Earning money is difficult. Spending it, not so much. Pietro Lombardi has also had this experience, as he now freely admits. There was even a phase in which he literally squandered the money. And that’s not so long ago.
Eleven years have passed since Pietro Lombardi was crowned the winner of “Deutschland sucht den Superstar” (DSDS). And indeed, as a result, he succeeded in becoming a pop star. Undoubtedly one of the perks of that was the money that was now in his account. But the 30-year-old didn’t know how to deal with it properly for a long time, as he now admits in the new documentary “Pietro Lombardi: Family, Faith, Love” on RTL.
“Right after the DSDS victory, I think after three or four weeks, the first million was there,” Lombardi looks back at 2011. “It was blatant for me, really, because with such numbers I even had nothing to do”, he explains and adds: “I come from a 400-euro job. And suddenly I come into an area where someone says to me: Hey, here, sum X!”
When he was at school, he was always told: “Hopeless case! Nothing will come of it,” Lombardi said. Because he was “young and stupid”, he first bought a Porsche. “Then I went to my school and honked: ‘What’s going on? What?!'”
But not only after his DSDS victory was the money particularly loose at Lombardi. Even three years ago, he just knocked out the money. “In 2019, I had all my hits. ‘Phänomenal’, ‘Señorita’ … all in a row. I managed to spend a million euros in nine months. Without real estate, without investment … I didn’t have anything useful,” remembers he himself.
Lombardi becomes concrete: “I spent vacations, I was so stupid.” For example, he was on vacation “with my boys”. “I wanted to be cool, I ordered alcohol for the whole club for 50,000 euros. And I drank the Fanta,” Lombardi shakes his head at himself. “I was so broken in the head. It was a phase in my life where I now say: ‘Dude, Lombardi, what are you doing?!'” He gets really angry.
“If I earned 5,000 euros, then they were gone the next day,” he continues, explaining his casual handling of money at the time. “I squandered so much money that I can say today: I could have bought three more houses.”
And the singer frankly admits something else: “I didn’t pay any taxes at the beginning either. I didn’t even know what it means to pay taxes. Nobody taught me. I earned and spent money. At the end of the year I did Then I realized I did something wrong.”
The singer claims that he wasn’t taught to pay attention to money at school and has a flash of inspiration: “There should really be a subject for that at school.”
Nevertheless, he does not want to regret anything afterwards, explains the DSDS winner. “Because it was a good time at the moment. I just wanted to fascinate women somehow. I thought: ok, you can get them all with money,” he is honest.
Lombardi probably knows that it is not necessarily about the money to score points with women, at least since he found a new love with his new girlfriend Laura. With her, the father of seven-year-old Alessio, who comes from his marriage to Sarah Engels, is now expecting his second child.
And otherwise, Lombardi’s story had a good ending. Unlike other colleagues in the pop business, he finally got the curve in time. He’s not broke, no matter how much money he’s thrown on his head senselessly in the past.