Imagine being one of the top artists and songwriters in the game at one point, amassing millions of dollars from hit album and single sales, merchandise, endorsements, and all that comes with being at the peak of the music industry’s mountaintop, only to frivolously blow it. How often do we hear the tale of artists that had it all, only to lose it all?
Such was the case for singer/rapper/songwriter T-pain, real name Faheem Rasheed Najm. T-Pain, during the mid-2000s, contributed to the shift in the sound of Hip-Hop and R&B, incorporating heavily auto-tuned vocals over catchy melodies and creating hits such as “Buy U a Drank”, “Can’t Believe It”, and his most successful feature, Flo Rida’s 6x platinum-certified “Low”.
The Grammy Award-winning artist has also appeared in films like Lottery Ticket and Furious 7, while also having a guest-starring role for six episodes in The Cleveland Show as the voice of “Theodore”.
Not shy of doing and accomplishing it all, recently T-Pain was crowned the inaugural winner of Fox’s “The Masked Singer”. At first, he was apprehensive, but he told USA Today what convinced him was actually the costume. “I didn’t really get into it until I saw the choices for the costume. Once I saw Monster, I was like, ‘I just want to wear that thing.’ I wasn’t going to pass by that Monster,” he said. “I got into the (competition) just to wear the costume. As long as I got to wear it once, I was fine. … I didn’t think I was going to get past the first episode.”
Fans of the singer who have followed him closely in his career would be shocked to know that at one point, he went through a seriously low point. The Tallahassee native explained experiencing the “high end” of the financial spectrum, as well as the “low end”, detailing how he lost around $40 million of his income due to very bad investments.
“I’ve been mega-rich, I’ve been super broke, right in the middle of thinking I was mega-rich, and then got rich again, and you know learned how to really give a s— about money,” said the Rapper Turnt Sanga artist.
Trusting the wrong people, T-Pain left his finances to them while continuing in his career thinking that everything was going well. “I was letting my manager do it and he was way more optimistic than I was,” said the singer. “He would just buy complete dumps and think that we can just paint and then we should be fine. Never sold anything that we bought.”
T-Pain explains how he blew through a $40,000,000 bag 🤯💰 pic.twitter.com/SzTemHX03R
— Rap All-Stars 🏆 (@RapAllStars) August 10, 2019
The artist also revealed that he invested in plenty of failed real estate properties and made several lavish purchases, including a Bugatti which he eventually had to return due to a malfunction. The return ended up costing him as he lost money.
In what may perhaps be the most embarrassing moment for the artist, he admitted to having to borrow money to feed his children. “I had to borrow money to get my kids Burger King,” he confessed.
Since going through the financial woes, the rapper explained that he is now in a better place with his money. “Once you give a s— about the money you’re making, then you feel much better about your accomplishments, you feel much better about what you’re doing, you start paying attention to your work that makes you money,” he said.