![]() The play, I Know I’ve Been Changed, was a story of child-abuse survivors. He eventually cobbled together $12,000, which he used to rent space at a community theater in Atlanta to produce a work he had drafted in his spare time. He began writing scripts while selling cars and serving as a bill collector. One highlight: meeting game-show host Pat Sajak. The young Perry would use badges left behind in empty rooms to sneak into closed gatherings. In his early 20s, he worked at the Windsor Court Hotel in New Orleans, home to the annual National Association of Television Program Executives conference. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned in progress.”Īfter dropping out of high school, he gained knowledge any way he could. “My father doesn’t know anything about business, and my uncles and mother, they know nothing about this. “You got to understand, I had no mentors,” Perry says. He was inspired to write out the stress he was feeling after watching an episode of Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, and spent his 20s touring small theaters around the country performing the plays he wrote, produced and starred in - a crash course in what was to come. He was dealing with more than poverty: He describes an upbringing by an abusive man who he later learned was not his father. “Ownership,” he adds, “changes everything.”Ī natural ham, Perry grew up making his mother laugh with impersonations. “ means you were poor as hell.” It also makes success sweeter. “I love when people say you come from ‘humble beginnings,’ ” he says. Today, Forbes estimates his net worth at $1 billion, with a clear path to future membership in The Forbes 400. Quite a lifestyle for a once-homeless playwright raised in poverty in New Orleans. 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. He used that control to leverage a deal with Viacom-CBS that pays him $150 million a year for new content and gives him an equity stake in BET+, the streaming service it debuted last September. The 51-year-old entertainer owns the entirety of his creative output, including more than 1,200 episodes of television, 22 feature films and at least two dozen stage plays, as well as a 330-acre studio lot at the edge of Atlanta’s southern limits. Mostly dismissed by the Hollywood establishment and even some other Black luminaries (Spike Lee once derided Perry’s crass slapstick approach as “coonery buffoonery” before later relenting), Perry has succeeded for two reasons: He has honed a product that too many others viewed as destined for the discount bin. That’s an especially winning strategy in a system that feels stacked against you.
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