Tyler Perry is in the billionaires club!
The movie mogul is worth $1.4 billion in pretax income since 2005, Forbes Africa reports.
He owns all of his projects which include over 1,200 episodes of television, 22 feature films, and at least two dozen stage plays according to the report. His 330-acre Tyler Perry studio brings in $280 million, he makes $40 million from real estate, $300 million from cash and investments plus $60 million for his stake in BET+.
Perry said,
“I love when people say you come from ‘humble beginnings,’ ” he says. “[It] means you were poor as hell.” It also makes success sweeter. “Ownership,” he adds, “changes everything.”
This is an incredible achievement considering he was once homeless in New Orleans writing screenplays. Then he began selling cars and working as a bill collector. When he saved up $12,000, he rented a space at a community theater in Atlanta to produce a work he had drafted in his spare time. Last year he made history by opening the first black-owned mega film studio.