Dr. Dre made headlines earlier this year when Apple purchased Beats Music for around 3 billion dollars. According to Forbes, this resulted in Dre making a grand total of $620 million this year. This is a staggering amount of money. You can say the words “six hundred and twenty million” but that doesn’t really do it justice. I mean, there are countries, with GDPs smaller than this (Looking at you, Samoa. Step up your game). To give you an impression of how much money Dre made, we met up and put together a list of things that he could do with that money.
- At the going price of $9.99 on iTunes, Dre could purchase 52 million copies of The Chronic: 2001, making it the best selling album of all time, and still have enough left over to buy 51 million copies of “Forgot About Dre” (at $1.29 apiece) to make it the best selling single of all time.
- US farmers produce roughly 26 million metric tons of sugar beets annually, or 9.6% of the global annual output. California beet farmers yield nearly 160 tonnes per hectare and the average price of irrigated farmland in California is $29,640 per hectare. This means that if Dre spent all of his Beats money on a new farming venture, there could be a 13% chance your salad is made with Beets By Dre.
- For the “I Need A Doctor” music video Dre let a film crew crash his Ferrari Modena. Judging by his reaction he actually kinda enjoyed it:
Assuming a $250,000 price tag, Dre could total a Ferarri every day for the next 6.8 years if he wanted. Maybe a full seven if he took a break on federal holidays.
- Last May, Dr. Dre and Beats co-founder, Jimmy Iovine donated $70 million to the University of Southern California to establish a new undergraduate major for students with interest in the arts and entrepreneurship. USC honored Iovine with an Honorary Doctorate of Music. Dre however, while also present at the 2013 commencement, was not and still does not have any legitimate basis for calling himself “Dr.” If that ever bothered him, Dre could afford to enroll in one of USC’s 126 Doctoral Programs… or all of them. He could first complete the 106 Undergraduate majors and 131 Masters Degree programs as pre-requisites and would still have 90% of his Beats money intact.
- The cost of renting a 10 foot U Haul in Long Beach, CA and driving it to Nebraska City, NE is $1,465. The population of Compton CA is around 94,000. For less than 25% of his yearly income, Dre could literally move every single person straight outta Compton
To wrap this up: In the words of JT’s character from The Social Network “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Releasing Detox”