Love him or hate him, Jake Paul knows how to make money. And after Paul, the YouTube star-turned-professional boxer, suffered his first loss at the hands of Tommy Fury on Feb. 26, 2023, in Saudi Arabia, the self-glossed “Problem Child” displayed a quality few had expected to see from the Cleveland, Ohio native — humility.
Paul, 26 years old, literally and figuratively took the loss to Fury on the chin. He offered no excuses for the defeat, which came from a split decision. He promised there would be a rematch. He vowed to fight better the next time around. He credited Fury for being the better boxer on that night.
Therein lies the genesis of Paul’s genius. And fortune. For over a decade, he’s been able to find new and interesting ways to recreate himself in an era of fleeting fame on social media, where celebrity seems to come and go quicker than we’ve ever seen in American culture.
Along the way, he’s amassed a net worth that will make your head spin. Here’s how he did it.
It All Started With YouTube
Eric Charbonneau / AP Photo
By the time Jake Paul was 10 years old in Cleveland, Ohio, he was filming himself and posting videos on YouTube alongside his older brother, social media star (and also sometimes boxer) Logan Paul.
Jake Paul was the first to hit it big with social media on the now defunct app Vine, which let users create six-second clips. It was an early version of TikTok, essentially, and Paul created one of the largest followings in the world with 5.3 million followers and 2 billion views.
By 2014, when he was 16 years old, he’d started his own YouTube channel that became known for his pranks and burgeoning rap career.
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‘Team 10’ Blows Up the Spot
In 2018, Jake Paul announced his first venture after being fired from the Disney Channel show “Bizaardvark.” He created the Team 10 corporation with $1 million in capital from various corporate investors to focus on teenage-themed entertainment, aka social media networking, and what we know now as an influencer house.
Paul’s first success with Team 10 came with his hit rap song “It’s Everyday Bro,” which accumulated 70 million views in its first month on YouTube and as of February 2023 had almost 300 million views. The song went certified platinum, and Paul even put out a remix with rapper Gucci Mane.
At the end of 2018, Jake Paul was No. 2 on the Forbes list of the highest-earning YouTube stars for the year with a reported $21.5 million in income off the YouTube channel alone. His older brother, Logan Paul, was at No. 10 with $14.5 million. By the time he was 21 years old, Jake was already a multimillionaire.
RELATED: Richest Rappers of All Time
Boxing Earnings Go Through the Roof
Chris O’Meara / AP Photo
What happens when you take a social media star and cross them with a professional athlete? You get Jake Paul. And you get major bank.
Over 2021 and 2022, Jake Paul continued taking professional boxing matches — exclusively against former MMA fighters — and pushed his record to 6-0 with wins over Ben Askren, Tyron Woodley (twice) and Anderson Silva.
The money he made from fighting was ridiculous, placing him not only on the Forbes list of the highest-paid social media stars in both years but also the highest-paid athletes in the world, earning a reported $38 million in 2022.
Paul answered the criticism of him only fighting former MMA guys by setting up the fight against Tommy Fury in February 2023 — an actual professional boxer — for a reported payday of $10 million for Paul and around $3 million for Fury.
Controversy at Almost Every Turn
Marta Lavandier / AP Photo
One part of becoming a social media star is courting controversy. This is something Jake Paul has done at every step of his career.
Paul has at different times been accused of funding online scams for “life courses” at $7 per session, promoting “mystery box” prizes that participants never received and, like many, many celebrities in the 2020s, getting caught up in a cryptocurrency scam.
Throughout the pandemic, Paul ran into trouble over and over again by throwing parties at his mansion in Calabasas, California, throughout 2020. The home was eventually the target of an FBI raid in August 2020 as part of an “ongoing investigation,” which was never specified and ended with no charges being filed against Paul.
There was also the infamous “Got Your Hat!” incident before Logan Paul’s 2021 fight against former champion Floyd Mayweather. Jake Paul snatched the hat off of Mayweather’s head following a news conference.
How Will Jake Paul Reinvent Himself Next?
WWE
Here’s the thing about boxing careers. They don’t usually last for a long time, and they don’t usually end well for those involved. The long-term health risks are extraordinary. So we shouldn’t count on seeing Jake Paul fight into his 30s, although he will definitely hit another big payday for his rematch with Tommy Fury in the second half of 2023.
The logical next step for Paul seems to be professional wrestling and the WWE, which his older brother has already made headway into, replete with an electrifying move during the Royal Rumble in San Antonio in January 2023.
Jake Paul has already made an appearance at a WWE event, showing up at his older brother’s Crown Jewel match against Roman Reigns in November 2022 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — the same location where Jake Paul fought Tommy Fury in February 2023.
After that, it’s not hard to see a path to Jake Paul and Logan Paul becoming action movie stars, a la former pro wrestlers Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and John Cena.
Whatever happens, the money is sure to follow.
