What is Tyler Perry's net worth? The filmmaker's journey from 'poor as hell' to Hollywood's newest billionaire
There is a new name added to the list of billionaires in Hollywood and it's none other than tycoon Tyler Perry. In case you are wondering, it's the same Perry who recently hosted Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at his Beverly Hills mansion. Forbes magazine announced that he had become “Hollywood’s newest billionaire." However, that was not always the case as Perry had quite a humble background.
''I love when people say you come from ‘humble beginnings.’ [It] means you were poor as hell. Ownership changes everything,'' Perry told Forbes. “You got to understand, I had no mentors. My father doesn’t know anything about business, and my uncles and mother, they know nothing about this. I didn’t go to business school. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned in progress.”
Being a high school dropout, Perry at a young age started gathering knowledge anywhere and everywhere he could find. In his 20s, he worked at the Windsor Court Hotel in New Orleans, home to the annual National Association of Television Program Executives conference. He did multiple jobs to make ends meet. He sold cars and served as a bill collector, all the while writing scripts. Eventually, he was able to save up $12,000, which he used to rent space at a community theater in Atlanta to produce a work he had penned in his free time. It was a play called 'I Know I’ve Been Changed,' which was a story of child-abuse survivors. Although it was not an overnight success, Perry made some important connections that catapulted him to fame and riches, enabling him to enter the world of Hollywood.
But Hollywood was not a dream come true at first. “I couldn’t walk down the street without people screaming, ‘Madea, Tyler, Madea!’” Perry said, alluding to a character he had created before venturing to Hollywood. “And then I got to Hollywood, and they had no clue. No clue to what I’d done, who I was or the following I had. There was about a 10-year period where everything went on a deep lull and there was nothing being made for people of color. The ignorance I had about Hollywood was so wonderful, looking back on it.''
But Perry did not give up. He rented a warehouse behind a strip club in south Atlanta and continued to work on a sitcom idea. His first break came in 2006, when a newly formed network, The CW, bought 10 episodes of his sitcom and aired them as 'House of Payne' to great success. A rival network, TBS, offered him $200 million to get him away from The CW, promising it would air at least 90 new episodes of his show that he would own outright. Then there was no looking back for Perry. He eventually went on to set up his own production house which became a venue for entertainment for Black audiences.
''Forbes estimates Perry has earned more than $1.4 billion in pretax income since 2005, which he used to buy homes in Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, as well as two planes. Quite a lifestyle for a once-homeless playwright raised in poverty in New Orleans,'' the publication wrote in its report, welcoming Perry to the path to join future membership in The Forbes 400.