The Weeknd just did something no male artist in history has ever done.

The superstar closed his After Hours Til Dawn Stadium Tour on Nov. 4 in Kuala Lumpur, wrapping a four-year run that grossed more than $1.3 billion — the highest-grossing tour ever by a male artist, passing Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour and its $939 million.

The numbers are staggering. Since kicking off in July 2022, the tour spanned 176 shows across 67 cities, 30 countries and five continents, selling more than 9 million tickets, according to promoter Live Nation. It now ranks as the third-biggest tour of all time, behind only Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour ($2 billion) and Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres tour ($1.5 billion-plus).

The tour was still breaking records at the finish line. In 2026 alone it grossed more than $500 million and sold over 3 million tickets, and in July it topped Billboard’s monthly Boxscore chart with more than $120 million and nearly 900,000 tickets in a single month.

The run also gave back: Live Nation reported $8.5 million in donations to the XO Humanitarian Fund and Global Citizen over the course of the tour.

And the catalog keeps working, too. The Weeknd’s 2019 hit “Blinding Lights” remains the most-streamed song in Spotify history, with more than 5 billion streams.

Elton John’s farewell run — 330 shows between 2018 and 2023 — held the male-artist record until now. The Weeknd needed barely half as many shows to pass it. For a tour that started in the shadow of a pandemic-delayed launch, that’s a finish nobody saw coming — except, maybe, the 9 million people who bought a ticket.

The Weeknd — portrait by Brian Ziff, via Wikimedia Commons

Sources: Live Nation via PR Newswire | USA Today | Pollstar