Is Charlie Sheen Worth More as a Trainwreck Than a TV Star?

Now that Charlie Sheen has been fired from Two and a Half Men, does he have the potential to make even more money, or less?
—BumperBee, via the inbox
Alas, Charlie Sheen may have tiger-channeling blood and fire-breathing fists. But unless he also has a bunghole that can press gold bars, Sheen will have to work very hard to even approach the kind of paychecks he got via Men.
What kind of work? Well...
RELATED: Charlie Sheen fired from Two and a Half Men
Let's start out with the money Sheen has apparently lost.
That includes the more than $1 million per episode fee he demanded to shout those lines on Two and a Half Men. (Sheen has threatened to sue his former employers for lost wages, but no official court action yet.) Sheen also recently lost an endorsement deal with Hanes.
But does that mean that earning potential for Sheen has dropped, at least as an endorser?
Far from it.
"If anything, demand could get even bigger," says Ariel Stepp, founder of Stepp Up, a PR and marketing company specializing in celebrity brand integration. She noted that a beverage brand called Just Chill has publicly offered Sheen $3 million for an endorsement, though Stepp doubts whether such a small brand has that kind of money. Either way, the point is that brands still see Sheen as a name that can make them money.
Sheen also has been recruited by the celebrity-Twitter-shilling firm Ad.ly, which works with Kim Kardashian and other stars. Through ad.ly, Sheen recently put out a paid Tweet on behalf of the company Internships.com, and, while nobody is disclosing how much Sheen made, his payday was apparently unprecedented.
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"Tweets for most of our celebs range from $200 to $10,000 plus, and then individual Facebook Page status updates can go for more than that—up to the $25,000 range," Ad.ly's Sean Rad tells me.
"Obviously, Charlie is in a class by himself, with the eyes of the world upon him. His was the highest paid tweet in history, and is performing as such, with 160,000 total clicks.
"We have had a flood of incoming calls and emails from brands of all sorts—in a wide variety of categories, from entertainment and media to technology and online services, and everything in between."
One last bit to consider, albeit with a huge grain of salt: Sheen's agent, Liz Dalling, told CNNMoney that her warlock typically charges $1 million for endorsements. That kind of talk is often smoke-blowing designed to weed out riff-raff from serious bidders, Stepp says. But Sheen could very well likely charge a nice sum for endorsements these days—five or six figures, if not seven.
"I don't think there is any way you could get him to commit to the amount of work it would take for a million-dollar endorsement," she notes.
But fat stack of cash for a few Tweets and Facebook posts? Sure.
And, between that work and Sheen's residuals on Two and a Half Men, the actor could make enough to support himself—and his goddesses—in at least moderate style for the foreseeable future.
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