The 25-year-old internet bad boy is riding his brashness to seven-figure paydays as a fighter and a promoter—with more to come.
It’s the night before the most important fight in women’s boxing history, but the center of attention is Jake Paul. Holding court on stage at Madison Square Garden’s Hulu Theater, dressed in a Gen Z-approved all-beige get-up and sneakers with pink laces, he sits across from famed boxing promoter Eddie Hearn. Although Hearn has worked with some of the biggest names in the sport—Canelo Álvarez, Anthony Joshua and Gennady Golovkin—audience members are more interested in what Paul has to say. Particularly, who he’s planning to fight next.
A fan rattles off the names of potential opponents. “I don’t know who these people are, like any of these people,” Paul says. “Everyone has to get in line. I think everyone wants to fight me to be the person that knocks Jake Paul out and make a bunch of money.”
Jake Paul and Eddie Hearn.
Stephen McCarthy/Getty Images
No doubt there’s a long line of people who would like to knock Paul out, and some who’d do it for free. A prominent member of the first wave of performers to gain fame, and notoriety, solely online, the brash, arrogant Paul, 25, has amassed a list of reasons for people to dislike him. He’s been accused twice of sexual assault, publicly denying the first allegation and calling it “100% false.” (Paul’s representatives declined to comment on any accusations, and no charges have been filed.) The FBI raided his home in 2020 after video showed him at a mall that was being looted (charges were dropped). He’s called Covid-19 a “hoax.”
His internet antics, which included setting bonfires in an empty pool and racing dirt bikes in the streets, attracted a certain type of fan and repulsed others, including Disney, which bounced him from its TV show Bizaardvark. Paul’s Team 10, a reality project featuring influencers living in the same house, racked up a laundry list of complaints, including the exploitation of participants, an accusation Paul denies. In 2017, Paul’s older brother, Logan, a controversial YouTuber in his own right, uploaded the infamous “Suicide Forest” video, which purported to show a dead body hanging in the woods, and Jake was swept up in the fallout. “No one wanted to work with us,” Paul told a YouTube interview show. “My life was pretty much ruined.”
None of that has stopped him. Paul is proof that being a bad boy can pay. He seems to have found his niche, and less than three years after his first professional bout, Paul has transformed himself from shock-content internet star into a boxing force and, he’d like you to believe, the future of the sport.
Hate him a lot or hate him a little, it’s working: Paul, who lives in Puerto Rico, is the world’s 46th-highest-paid athlete, according to Forbes, having earned $38 million before taxes over the last 12 months. His two fights over that span fetched him around $30 million, even though he has still never fought a professional boxer.
“It doesn’t make any sense, but hey, it is what it is, right?” Paul says of his astronomical earnings. “People want to see the fights, I guess, and the money comes along with that.”
Click here for full coverage of the Forbes Highest-Paid Athletes list.
For once, he’s being modest. With more than 60 million followers across social media channels and a penchant for hurling attention-grabbing insults at boxing’s biggest names, Paul has injected the kind of viral attention desperately needed by a sport trying to break through to younger fans. Now, in partnership with former UFC CFO Nakisa Bidarian, he’s using his company, Most Valuable Promotions, to reshape the standards of boxing.
It’s already paying dividends. Paul teamed up with Hearn to organize what would become the most successful women’s fight ever, a sold-out event between Amanda Serrano and Katie Taylor at the Garden in April that paid the two fighters more than $1 million each.
“This is just the start, and I love proving y’all wrong, and I’ll continue to prove y’all wrong.”
Bad behavior is no barrier to boxing prominence. If Jake Paul turns out to be exactly what the sport needs, and it’s looking like he is, it won’t be despite his offensiveness. It’ll be because of it.
That Paul found fame as an unsavory internet prankster could be a reason the boxing community has been so reluctant to accept him. “Definitely a lot of people still see him as a gimmick,” says Will Harvey, head of boxing at 258 Management, which works with boxers including Joshua and WBO cruiserweight champion Lawrence Okolie. He adds: “There are plenty of fighters that are far more talented than Jake that grind away for years, decades sometimes. I just think that they resent the fact that he has been able to get to the top and earn so much money so quickly.”
While not impossible, it’s unusual for professional boxers to pick up the sport in their 20s. It’s a discipline requiring years of mental and physical training, plus match repetitions. Although Paul has improved, experts remain split on how far he can go. Oscar De La Hoya and Joe Rogan have both called Paul the real deal. Hearn is not so convinced.
“He’s not terrible, but he’s not very good,” says Hearn, chairman of British sports promotion company Matchroom. He’s “never going to be a world champion, never going to be a world-class fighter, never going to be able to compete against anyone who’s even close to world level. But I’ve seen worse.”
Paul secured a fifth-round TKO over Deji in 2018 to kickstart his boxing career.
Andy Kelvin/Newscom
Paul’s entry into boxing wasn’t for love of the game; it was opportunistic. His internet career was on the skids when, in 2018, British YouTuber KSI and his brother, Deji, called out Paul and his brother, Logan. With no prior boxing experience, Paul defeated Deji by TKO and, he says, “fell in love with the sport.” He turned pro 17 months later and beat another YouTuber, AnEsonGib. Then Paul rattled off four more victories, three against former MMA fighters that featured eight-figure paydays. An ESPN Ringside poll dubbed his most recent fight, against former UFC welterweight champion Tyron Woodley in December, the “Knockout of the Year.”
“This is just the start, and I love proving y’all wrong, and I’ll continue to prove y’all wrong, and hop aboard the train or get the fuck out of the way because you’re going to get ran over,” Paul says. “I’m hungry, I’m motivated, and there’s just nothing that anyone could do to stop me.”
Paul couldn’t have timed his arrival any better. Boxing suffered a pandemic-driven shock, sending promoter revenues down a staggering 47% in 2020 to $236 million, according to a report from IBISWorld. Big-name outfits such as Mayweather Promotions, Golden Boy Promotions and Top Rank all applied for government PPP loans to keep the lights on.
For years, the pay-per-view model’s limitations have capped exposure to new fans, so much so that dwindling ratings prompted HBO to end its 45-year association with boxing in 2018. But the emergence of new media platforms keen to reshape the business and a growing global audience have breathed new life into boxing, and the sport is gaining ground with younger fans thanks to pop-culture crossovers, like Paul, who was more recognizable to boxing fans than megastars like Álvarez, Joshua and Golovkin, according to a May 2021 Harris Poll. It’s also a breeding ground for sharable, short-form internet content. Paul’s profanity-laced challenge of Conor McGregor a year ago generated nearly five million views on YouTube, and his knockout of Woodley more than doubled that figure.
An uncanny ability to drum up attention created another opportunity for Paul. He previously had taken on Bidarian as an advisor for both his boxing career and other business deals. When Paul’s wins started to pile up, and the cash poured in, he figured he could produce the same kind of attention for other fighters. The pair founded Most Valuable Promotions in 2021.
Paul has floated the idea of a Katie Taylor-Amanda Serrano trilogy in the aftermath of the first fight’s success.
Sarah Stier/Getty Images
After meeting Serrano at his professional debut—she was on the undercard—Paul signed her as MVP’s first fighter (outside of himself), and he later added rising star Ashton Sylve. MVP had mixed success at the gate and on pay-per-view promoting Paul’s last two fights, but Serrano’s matchup with Taylor was a roaring success, with 19,187 spectators packing the Garden for the event and DAZN announcing 1.5 million viewers tuned in globally. Not that he deserves 100% of the credit, but it’s hard to ignore Paul’s aptitude for marketing. “That fight would never have been as big if Jake Paul wasn’t involved,” 258 Management’s Harvey says. “You can’t ignore the positive impact that he’s had there.”
Yet despite what Paul says, his sole focus isn’t on boxing. He’s playing venture capitalist with a $15 million fund that has investments in web3 developer Alchemy, blockchain game Blocktopia and Elon Musk’s edtech startup Synthesis. In the pipeline, he has another fund, this one close to $50 million, and a sports gambling venture that he’s keen to stay quiet on. Because he has severe attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, Paul says, “doing a bunch of things is actually better for me.”
Paul plans to fight twice a year and is aiming to return to the ring August 13, with his opponent to be announced. It’ll be a test of both his fighting and promoting prowess. Paul’s fight in December disappointed commercially and reportedly drew only 65,000 pay-per-views after Woodley subbed in as his opponent at the 11th hour. To keep inching toward his goal of becoming a “world champion, personally, just to laugh in everyone’s face” means continuing to up the ante.
“If I’m not winning the fights and all of this shit, that doesn’t matter,” Paul says. “So that comes first and foremost.”
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinbirnbaum/2022/05/18/hate-him-a-little-or-hate-him-a-lot-jake-paul-is-making-millions-in-the-boxing-ring/