Dr. Dre by the numbers: Charting a decade of earnings

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Over the ten years Forbes has tracked the top 20 Hip-Hop Cash Kings, the highest-earning rap stars have pulled in an average of $22.5 million per act per year—or a combined total of $4.5 billion pretax. The king of kings is rapper-producer Andre ‘Dr. Dre’ Young, who has accounted for roughly a quarter of that three-comma haul—almost none of which came from his music. The NWA cofounder launched Beats by Dr. Dre in 2006 and took home $620 million when Apple acquired the company in 2014 for $3 billion. Further proof that rhyme pays.