The world of rap is known for its big spenders and spendy items; pet sharks, solid gold limos; bling, bling, bling! But of all the trappings that absorb that extra income, rappers across the board don’t skimp on two things; videos and high-technology.
A quick look at the value of the top forty rap videos on the Billboard Top 100 tells us which rapper spends the most on their video drops. Here’s a glance at forty rap videos, featuring over sixty million pounds (£62 mil) in bling to find out who’s got the skills to pay the bills, and what those bills amount to.
Prepare yourself; the answer may shock you!
Rapper Lil Wayne leads the pack, blowing as much as £13,247,000 on Lollipop. So suck on that! 50 Cent went to the Candy Shop and blew almost £8,000,000. It may seem sweet to us, but it’s still a long way back from Lollipop. Now that is sweet. He also spent a cool £6,715 on Pimp, because it’s hard out there for a … well, you know.
21 Savage spent a lot on A Lot, just over £7,000,000. Not a cheap date, but worth every penny if you ask his record company. Terror Squad leaned back into a bill of about £4,160,00 for the video for Lean Back, and that’s the kind of debt you lean into.
DJ Khaled’s I’m the One cost a good deal more than that; £3,350,000 was charged up to send that hit up the charts. Well, as they way; one has to spend scrilla to make scrilla. Drake’s In My Feelings capped out at just over £2,000,000, Meek Mill’s Going Bad clocked up a hefty £1,237,500. Wiz Khalifa paid £1,127,000 to See You Again, and Nelly’s Dilemma was solved for just over £1,000,000.
Of these fan favorites, Lollipop, Candy Shop, and A Lot spent the most money on bling, a total of over £28,000,000!
And you might think that the rich and famous and most likely notorious spend a lot of money on videos and jewelry, but wait until you get an eyeful of what they spend of bigger, more permanent things: over £39,000,000 in real estate,
over £7,000,000 in real estate,
almost £7,000,000 in vehicles,
almost £5,000,000 in jewelry and almost £1,600,00 in clothing.
And that’s not even counting the Crystal.
But there’s a lot more to videos than spending. There’s the earning, too!
Fifty Cent drags in a ton of coin, from his videos and music but a lot more. Thanks to lucrative endorsement deals, he’s bringing in a whole lot of Benjies. As he rapped in his 2007 hit, I Get Money:” I took quarter water, sold it in a bottle for two bucks, and Coca-Cola came and bought it for billions.”
Dope!
In July 2015, 50 Cent declared a net worth of $16 million in a messy legal matter. Today, those same estimates would put his worth at about $30 million. But was his success due to the money he spent on the videos or is it the other way around? Let’s take a closer look.
According to the website Celebrity Net Worth, DJ Khaled is worth about $65 million (US), which shows a steady increase from $7m in 2014 to $39m in 2019. The same website tells us that 21 Savage’s investments have earned him a cool $12m (US), so the idea of spending a bit more on videos makes more and more sense when you look at the net results. But let’s take a closer look.
According to the same website, Lil Wayne is said to be worth about $120m (US), and 50 Cent’s worth is estimated at $30m (US), though you’d have to factor in various factors, most judicial, to come up with the right numbers.
And where’s all this money going? Tech. And we don’t just mean buying high-tech toys or shooting videos on high-tech equipment, but investing and developing high-tech companies. According to an article on the website Distractify, Chamillionaire has his startup, Convoz, and is also an investor in Lyft and Makers Studios. Ludacris is responsible for the app Slang N’ Friends, an urban version of the famous game Words With Friends. Both rappers have partners in these endeavors. Props!
Soulja Boy has a game console, and a handheld too (SouljaGame) and Mims gave us the app RecordGram, hybrid streaming service, and recording studio. Once-bankrupted rapper MC Hammer is more than just a man of the cloth; DanceJam or Wiredoo are both high-tech companies he launched.
Pusha T released his hip hop app, Heir, and Akon hopes to create his own so-called “crypto city” with its digital cash currency, Akoin. Jefferson Starship may have claimed to have built this city on rock’n’roll, but Pusha T is hoping to build a city on rap.
But what matters is the bottom line, and the bottom line is this, to put it in the parlance of the mobsters who inspired so much of the gangsta rap culture: Them whats shows the respect, gets the respect. And in the gangsta world of bling and all that goes with it, the moral remains the same. You get what you pay for; the better and the pricier the video, the more sales you chalk up and the higher your coinage. And tech is behind those videos and the future. It’s the fortune of some of our most successful rappers and entrepreneurs.
That’s the way it is on the streets, and the way it’s always gonna be, yo.
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