Like Diddy, Jay, or Dre. And Drake says he has advisers looking into that now, investments and the like, because $250 million is the stated goal by the time he’s 29.
“I feel this great responsibility to see how far can we take it,” he says, “how out of reach can I set that bar for whoever comes after. While I’m here, I’m gonna keep pushing that bar higher and higher up and make you really work for it.”
When “Started from the Bottom” went viral, some of the inevitable snickering centered around the question: What “bottom” was Drake talking about exactly? After all, unlike Jay-Z, he hadn’t sold crack growing up—or, like his mentor, Lil Wayne, done jail time. He grew up in a nice neighborhood in Toronto, the only son of a single mother. As a child actor playing a paraplegic on Degrassi: The Next Generation, he made $40,000 a year. A YouTube parody of the song, with 5 million hits of its own, includes the lines Started middle class in a wheelchair / On a crappy sitcom making good cash every year.
When asked about it, he nods. “I think a lot of people wish their favorite rapper wrote it—as if a song like that should be gangster—but I was the one who wrote it, and everyone has their bottom,” he says. “The three biggest misconceptions about me are that I’m a cocky asshole because I’m a famous male rapper, that any part of me wants to be gangster or hood, and that I grew up rich.”