Dr. Dre On Becoming A Billionaire: “I Don’t Chase Money. I Try To Make The Money Chase Me.”

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Late on a Thursday night in the spring of 2014, actor Tyrese Gibson went live on Facebook with Dr. Dre to celebrate the sale of the company Dre cofounded, Beats electronics, to Apple for $3.2 billion.  

The 61-year-old Dre—born Andre Romelle Young—never forgets how far he’s come from his childhood in Compton, Cali­fornia, where he grew up with a teenage mother and an abusive father during the height of Los Angeles’ gang violence and crack cocaine epi­demics. “I had no problem going to cut grass just to buy shoes when I was younger,” he says of his childhood. “I would do what I had to do just to get what I wanted.” Despite his wealth, he swears that nothing in his career has been motivated by money and instead credits his success to an obsession with creating perfect products, whether it’s music, headphones or his latest venture, a gin brand.

“I don’t chase money—I try to make the money chase me,” says Dre, who ranks No. 20 on Forbes list of the Greatest Self-Made Americans. “I’ve always been able to bet on myself, and whatever I do and wherever I go, I know I have my talent with me.”

The money he has earned has afforded him the ultimate freedom, Dre says, especially after his divorce in 2021 from Nicole Young, his wife of nearly 25 years. He can fill his time now doing whatever he wants. Some of it he spends relaxing, of course, but more often he’s chasing after the next big thing.

hose who have spent time working with Dre, whether in the studio, at Beats or on another venture, know his process can be painstaking and that he doesn’t stop tinkering until he feels a project is good enough to release.

“Time doesn’t exist with Dr. Dre,” says frequent collaborator Eminem via email. “He isn’t focused on dates or deadlines or when something should come out—he’s only thinking about whether something is ready.  For instance, on [Dre’s] 2001 album, I thought it was ready before he got ‘Still D.R.E.’ [recor­ded]. And then I realized if Dre thought he was done, the world would have never heard it.”  Sometimes the world never does. After working on his highly anticipated album Detox for more than a decade, Dre scrapped the project entirely in 2015, reinforcing his reputation as a perfectionist.  “Perfectionist is sometimes just a word I use to buy time,” he says. “If I have a release date and the song isn’t right, am I supposed to turn it in? No, I’ll take the proper time until it’s right.”

Opportunities to boost his earnings always glimmered, with many brands hoping to get him to endorse them. He remembers seeing Iovine walking down the beach in 2006 in Malibu where he asked him whether he should consider launching a shoe line. “I just looked at him and said, ‘Man, what do you got to do with sneakers?’ “Let’s do speakers.”  The two became partners in Beats Electronics, manufacturing premium over-the-ear headphones at a time when the most popular style was the cheap earbuds that came free with the purchase of iPods and iPhones. Dre brought his same meticulous attention to product testing as he did to his music, honing a bass-boosting audio mix that he believed delivered a superior listening experience. Combined with Iovine’s marketing savvy, the brand took off immediately. Beats headphones were featured in the music videos of Interscope artists and on the heads of Team USA’s basketball team during the 2008 Olympics—an effort led by LeBron James, who was given a small piece of Beats equity to become an ambassador. Soon Beats by Dre became more than an audio accessory—they were a status symbol, similar to Nike’s Jordan brand revolution. The company grew from $180 million in sales in 2009 to $860 million in 2012, according to Forbes estimates.

Beats expanded beyond hardware in 2012, acquiring music streaming service MOG for an estimated $14 million. Dre and Iovine used the infrastructure to launch Beats Music in 2014, aiming to be a streaming competitor to Spotify and Pandora and, ultimately, a better acquisition target. Given how much his estimated 20% stake was potentially worth, Dre laughs at the idea that he would ever hesitate to sell. “That was easy,” he says. “That was, like, the best thing ever.”

Apple’s eventual $3 billion purchase of Beats is still the largest acquisition in the company’s history. Part of the logic behind the estimated $100 million each in stock for Dre and Iovine—and its four-year vesting schedule—was to bring them into the executive team that transitioned Beats Music into Apple Music in 2015.  Dre left Apple in 2018.

Looking for a new challenge, it was Iovine who once again supplied the idea. Talking with Dre and Snoop Dogg one day in the studio, he asked why they had never tried to turn their 1994 hit “Gin and Juice” into a physical product. “Gin is a lane of alcohol that doesn’t really do well,” Snoop tells Forbes, “so we chose a lane that doesn’t do well, so we can excel.” Adds Iovine: “Dre said, ‘We could kill that,’ and so did Snoop. And then the march to quality started.”

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