T-Pain is one of the biggest selling artists in the world, selling over 16 million albums and 50 million digital tracks worldwide since he burst onto the scene back in the early 2000s.
After racking up a string of No.1 hits throughout the decade including "Low" "Buy U A Drank" and "Kiss Kiss", T-Pain - real name Faheem Rasheed Majn - thought that the good times would never end.
But in a recent podcast interview with Jackass's Steve-O, the autotune maestro revealed that this mindset eventually led him to blow his entire $40 Million fortune in the space of twelve years, until he eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2019.
"Everybody before me that I had to look up to always said that once you start rapping, it's just good money, all the time, he explained.
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"Nothing bad's ever going to happen to you - it's just girls and swimming pools all the time!"
"Nobody ever sat me down and explained that all this good stuff can go away- all these singers, musicians, athletes just kept saying that once the money started rolling in it's gonna stay that way forever."
Among his many extravagances was buying a brand new Bugatti for $2.1 million only to sell it just a short time later for only $800k, to which Steve-O correctly asserts is akin to spending $1.3 million just to rent a car.
"And then I was like 'well, since I got this Bugatti I might as well buy another house!'. These people just moved out of a house that was literally connected to mine, and I wanted to buy it and build a path that literally connected the two properties.
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"It was at that point that somebody whispered in my ear and said 'hey- you know don't actually have any money left'."
Elsewhere in the interview T-Pain claims that he never bothered to check his bank balances, assuming that the royalty statements would keep rolling in and that the numbers would only ever go up, let people mismanage his funds and spent what they wanted without ever checking his bottom lines.
"They all knew that if I ever found out I was broke, the party was over for everybody, so they were all like 'don't let him know that he doesn't have any money, because if he finds out we're all gone'."
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Despite the setback the rapper and producer remains upbeat about his situation, claiming that the experience has taught him a lot, and that he now feels he has a responsibility to teach new artists how to be more financially responsible in order to avoid making the same mistakes he did.
Elsewhere in T-Pain news, the rapper recently admitted that he went into a 'four-year depression' after Usher told him his use of auto-tune 'f*cked up the music industry', though claims that the two of them have since reconciled and are now on good terms again.
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