Last June, when Jay-Z and Beyoncé welcomed twins to their family, they did what many couples do in the wake of a new arrival&#8211;move to a bigger home&#8211;on quite an epic scale. Over the next few months, they shelled out $26 million for an East Hampton mansion and scooped up an $88 million Bel Air estate, adding 21,000 square feet per newborn. That&#8217;s the sort of thing you can do when one partner is a pop demigod and the other is the richest rapper on the planet.
Jay-Z upped his net worth from $810 million to $900 million over the past year, seizing hip-hop&#8217;s cash crown for the first time since Forbes started counting back in 2011. The Brooklyn-born mogul&#8217;s jump is due mostly to the rising value of his interests in Armand de Brignac champagne and D&#8217;Ussé cognac, on top of nine-figure ownership stakes in his Roc Nation empire and Tidal streaming service.
&#8220;We always complain about, &#8216;We don&#8217;t own this, we don&#8217;t own that.&#8217; … Here he is, this man who owns that,&#8221; superproducer Swizz Beatz told me in an interview for my book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Diddy-Jay-Z-Hip-Hops-Multibillion-Dollar/dp/0316316539/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-ga-track="ExternalLink:https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Diddy-Jay-Z-Hip-Hops-Multibillion-Dollar/dp/0316316539/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8">3 Kings: Diddy, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z and Hip-Hop&#8217;s Multibillion-Dollar Rise</a>. &#8220;The sky is not the limit: it&#8217;s just a view.&#8221;
Jay-Z, Diddy and Dre are not only the wealthiest hip-hop acts on the planet, but the richest American musicians of any genre. Longtime Forbes Five champ Diddy ranks No. 2 this year despite increasing his fortune slightly in the past 12 months; tepid trends in the vodka and cable TV sectors have affected his interests in Ciroc and Revolt, but heady growth at DeLeón tequila, his joint venture with beverage giant Diageo&#8211;and massive annual earnings totals in recent years&#8211;have kept his net worth trending in the right direction.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/life/2017/12/05/kendrick-lamar-conscious-capitalist/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Kendrick Lamar: The Conscious Capitalist</a>
Dre ranks third with $770 million, creeping upward thanks to the market trends boosting his nine-figure windfall from Apple&#8217;s $3 billion buyout of Beats in 2014. The superproducer is also in line to receive a slug of Apple stock this summer worth well over $100 million; depending on the tech giant&#8217;s share price at the time, he could leapfrog Diddy and Jay-Z when that happens.
After the top three, there&#8217;s a long drop before the fourth and fifth names on the list: Drake and Eminem, tied at an even $100 million apiece. The youngest impresario of the bunch, 31-year-old Drake has earned more than $250 million since 2010, before taxes and spending; an equity stake in Virginia Black whiskey and pricey estates in Toronto, Canada, and Hidden Hills, California, pad his holdings. His inclusion on the Forbes Five represents yet another career goal achieved.
&#8220;If I&#8217;m not on your list this year, I&#8217;d be gravely disappointed,&#8221; he <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2013/02/14/drake-making-the-forbes-list-is-my-objective-every-year/#a5e3a5b26c57" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told</a> Forbes back in 2013. &#8220;That&#8217;s pretty much my objective every year … other than making good music.&#8221;
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/life/2017/10/13/dj-khaled-rolls-hip-hops-boldest-star-shows-off-major-keys/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: How DJ Khaled Rolls: Hip-Hop&#8217;s Boldest Star Shows Off His Major Keys</a>
Eminem isn&#8217;t known as a businessman like some of the other names on this list, but he&#8217;s still the best-selling rapper of all time and moved more albums in the U.S. during the 2000s than any act in any genre. Fresh off new album Revival, he makes his Forbes Five debut as former listmember Birdman&#8211;Drake&#8217;s Cash Money Records boss&#8211;slips below the $100 million mark in the wake of some <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/ent-columns-blogs/jose-lambiet/article190619084.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-ga-track="ExternalLink:http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/ent-columns-blogs/jose-lambiet/article190619084.html">apparent</a> liquidity issues.
To compile the Forbes Five rankings, we follow the same procedures used to calculate our <a href="https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">list of the world&#8217;s billionaires</a> (our annual update arrives Tuesday): valuing major assets, poring over financial documents, and speaking with analysts, attorneys, managers, other industry players and, in some cases, the moguls themselves.
So who will be the first hip-hop star to reach the billion-dollar mark? Trends in the spirits world could continue to play a key role for Jay-Z and Diddy. After the furious rise of vodka in the first part of this decade, fueled largely by flavored variants like those of Ciroc, the market has shifted towards cognac, whiskey and tequila.
&#8220;D&#8217;Ussé fits right in there,&#8221; says Eric Schmidt, Director of Alcohol Research at Beverage Marketing Corporation. &#8220;I think DeLeón is poised for growth … it could one day be the next Patrón, but it&#8217;s a long road.&#8221;
Jay-Z, meanwhile, shouldn&#8217;t be slacking off anytime soon: though he and Beyoncé bought their East Hampton abode outright, according to public records, their $88 million Bel Air mansion comes with a $52.8 million mortgage. &#8211; Written by <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-ga-track="contrib block byline">Zack O&#8217;Malley Greenburg</a>, FORBES STAFF

The Forbes Five: Hip-Hop’s Wealthiest Artists 2018

In the world of cryptocurrency, where billion-dollar fortunes can be made overnight, speed is everything — and CZ is the fastest of them all. From closet-size offices in Tokyo — &#8220;I would touch four people if I turned around in a circle&#8221;— the 41-year-old Chinese-Canadian coder runs Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange that has gone from a standing start to the largest on the planet in just under 180 days. CZ (born Changpeng Zhao) cut his teeth making high-frequency trading systems for Wall Street&#8217;s flash boys, and he built Binance to be a Ferrari. His exchange can process a blazing 1. 4 million transactions a second and on a peak trading day in January processed 3.5 billion new orders, cancels and trades. Speculators (some 25% of them from the U.S.) use Binance to trade 120 different coins, generating $200 million in profits for CZ&#8217;s exchange last quarter. BNB, the virtual coin CZ created in August that gives holders a 50% discount on trading fees, has a market cap of $1.3 billion. His stake in Binance and his coins give CZ a personal fortune worth as much as $2 billion.
He is hardly alone in becoming insanely and instantly rich from crypto. Chris Larsen, a longtime tech exec known for cofounding a string of fintech apps, saw his net worth flirt with $20 billion at the height of cryptomania in early January, based on his ownership of 5.2 billion XRP, the tokens of Ripple, the company he founded. XRP has since crashed 65%, but Larsen still tops Forbes&#8217; first crypto rich list, our (necessarily inexact) accounting of the 20 wealthiest people in crypto.
There are now nearly 1,500 crypto-assets in existence, valued at an aggregate of $550 billion, up 31 times since the beginning of 2017. While the prices of individual cryptocoins continue to swing wildly — Bitcoin is down almost 50% from its peak — it&#8217;s clear that blockchain-based currency is here to stay and that these virtual assets have real, albeit volatile and speculative, value. Black-market transactions, tax avoidance by individuals and sanctions-dodging by countries like North Korea fuel part of the demand, but so does a widespread excitement over the technology and an ideological desire for money to be free from the whimsies of nation-states.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/cover-story/2017/09/04/bitcoin-blockchain-billions/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Bitcoin, Blockchain And Billions</a>
The winners of this digital lottery differ from those in previous manias. The shadowy beginnings, at once anarchistic, utopian and libertarian, drew an odd lot of pioneers who ranged from anti-establishment cypherpunks and electricity-guzzling &#8220;miners&#8221; to prescient Silicon Valley financiers and a larger-than-usual assortment of the just plain lucky &#8220;hodlers&#8221; (the typo-inspired crypto jargon for &#8220;buy and hold&#8221; investors). As in any gold rush, selling the pans and pickaxes &#8211; in this case running exchanges &#8211; is proving a more reliable path to riches than speculation. And, of course, easy money — especially if it&#8217;s viewed as a bearer asset — attracts scam artists and thieves.
Banking heir Matthew Mellon, whose $2 million investment in <a href="https://ripple.com/xrp/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">XRP</a> blossomed into some $1 billion, learned that firsthand in January. The morning after a big bash, the 54-year-old recent divorcé says he discovered four people rooting around his $150,000-a-month Los Angeles party pad. (He didn&#8217;t report it to the police.) The unwanted guests were probably after his XRP and they stole four laptops and two cellphones. They didn&#8217;t get Mellon&#8217;s crypto-fortune — anyone with enough assets to make our list long ago figured out how to secure it. (Sorry, thugs.) In Mellon&#8217;s case, the private keys are divided up and safely scattered in cold storage around the country in other people&#8217;s names. But the incident underscores the weirdness that separates cryptomania from bubbles past.
Identifying the biggest crypto winners and estimating the scale of their wealth is no simple task. The virtual currencies exist almost entirely outside the global financial system, and the newly minted crypto rich live in a strange milieu that blends paranoid secrecy with ostentatious display. Take CZ&#8217;s <a href="https://www.binance.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Binance</a> exchange. It has no real headquarters: Employees are scattered across several countries, and CZ himself seems to change locales the way others change clothes. &#8220;We don&#8217;t want to be in one place right now because of regulatory uncertainty,&#8221; says CZ. Last we heard, CZ and his trademark black hoodie had just popped up in Taiwan.
And CZ is downright normal by crypto-billionaire standards. Former child actor Brock Pierce (The Mighty Ducks, First Kid) dresses like a cut-rate Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean and is given to making grandiose statements from the balcony of his penthouse in Santa Monica, California. &#8220;This is an opportunity to be a trillionaire &#8211; someone who is positively impacting a trillion living things on this planet,&#8221; he tells Forbes. Pierce once raised $60 million from Goldman Sachs with the help of Stephen Bannon, President Trump&#8217;s former chief strategist, to fund a company that sold virtual swords, chain mail and horses to role-playing videogamers. He also once got into trouble with his partners in a 1990s-era dot-com start-up after they were accused, in civil lawsuits, of sexual abuse of underaged boys. (Pierce has always denied the accusations and was never charged; one of his business partners, however, pleaded guilty to transporting minors across state lines for the purpose of sex.)
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/cover-story/2017/09/04/emperors-new-coins/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: The Emperor&#8217;s New Coins</a>
Pierce was early into the crypto game, first mining Bitcoin and then financing blockchain start-ups and investing in dozens of initial coin offerings. Although he publicly proclaims he is pledging a billion dollars to charity, he refuses to provide documentation that proves he has anywhere near that much money.
Given this opaqueness and crypto&#8217;s hyper-volatility, we are presenting our net-worth estimates in ranges. We based our numbers on estimated holdings of cryptocurrencies (a few provided proof), post-tax profits from trading crypto-assets and stakes in crypto-related businesses. We&#8217;ve also categorized our crypto rich list into five groups: idealists, builders, opportunists, infrastructure players and establishment investors. Many fit into more than one category.
It&#8217;s a near certainty that we&#8217;ve missed some people and that some of our estimates are wide of the mark. But this was equally true when we launched the first Forbes 400 list of America&#8217;s richest people in 1982. At the time, many people said we couldn&#8217;t — or shouldn&#8217;t — publish it. We did so anyway. And we firmly believe we made the world a better place by shining a light on the invisible rich. Just as crypto has evolved from the days of the Silk Road drug site and the Mt. Gox digital hijacking, fortunes of this magnitude should never be allowed to lurk in the shadows. &#8211; Written by <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-ga-track="contrib block byline">Jeff Kauflin</a>, FORBES STAFF
<a href="https://www.forbes.com/richest-in-cryptocurrency/#73d03dd11d49" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ THE FULL LIST OF THE RICHEST PEOPLE IN CRYPTOCURRENCY</a>

Tag: rich list

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

The Forbes Five: Hip-Hop’s Wealthiest Artists 2018

Forbes’ First List Of Cryptocurrency’s Richest People: Meet The Secretive Freaks, Geeks And Visionaries