Do we like Lars Ulrich?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Clean on harm, a long record of giving, and one old settled pay dispute with a former assistant keeps it off the top shelf.
Lars Ulrich is the Danish-born drummer who co-founded Metallica and has been the band's public face and chief talker for decades. He was knighted in Denmark in 2017, receiving the Knight's Cross of the Order of Dannebrog. He has long leaned into being Danish and a bit contrary: “Being Danish, I've always had, I think, a fairly easy relationship with being contrary.”
His biggest public stoush was the band's fight with Napster in the early 2000s, where Ulrich became the lightning rod. Years later he told Mojo it was never about the money but about control, and that once the band went public its peers left it to fight alone. Whether you think that was a artist standing up for his work or a rich rocker picking on fans, it's a copyright fight, not a harm-to-people one.
On the harm check, nothing nasty turned up. In 2017 he told Mexican TV that the world doesn't need walls and that people need to be brought together, a pointed jab at Trump's border plan. In 2020 he was asked who he'd vote for and wouldn't name anyone, saying fans could put two and two together. On Harvey Weinstein he called the conversation sparked by the allegations “long overdue”. I found nothing on trans rights from him either way, so that gap is worth knowing about.
The one real stain is a 2011 civil suit. A former personal assistant alleged he was underpaid for work between 2001 and 2009 and never received promised bonuses. Ulrich's lawyer answered that the assistant earned about $110,000 a year before bonuses, plus free rent and a vehicle. The case settled out of court in November 2011, terms undisclosed, so no court ever found against him.
The good stuff is real. Metallica's All Within My Hands foundation, set up in 2017, gave more than 1.5 million euros to local charities across 25 European shows in 2019, with at least $10,000 to food banks in each city. That's the band as a whole rather than Ulrich alone, but he's a founding member and a visible face of it.
As for now, Ulrich has been pushing the Sphere residency, which he had been weighing publicly since 2025. He told Howard Stern he'd love to do it, though nothing was locked in then. It's a big-budget gig, not a controversy, and there was nothing fresh to be cross about this week.