Back in 2014 Tyrese Gibson famously went live on Facebook and announced that Dr. Dre was going to be Hip Hop's first billionaire after signing a deal with Apple, before the deal was actually finalized [click here if you missed that].
Turns out Tyrese's antics cost Dr. Dre $200 million...
An excerpt from Tripp Mickle's new book "After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul," obtained by iMore breaks it down.
"At 2:00 a.m., Jimmy Iovine got a call from Puff Daddy, who was screaming that Dre and Tyrese, a rapper, were talking about the deal in a Facebook video. Iovine pulled up the video and cringed as he saw Tyrese bragging about being drunk on Heineken in a recording studio."
"When word of the video reached Tim Cook, he summoned Iovine and Dre to Cupertino. He invited them into a conference room for a private conversation. Iovine was anxious and afraid that Cook was going to kill the deal. Instead of the anger and cursing that would have poured out of Jobs in a moment like that, Cook exuded calm. He told the music executives that he was disappointed and wished that Dre's social media outburst hadn't happened but said that the video hadn't shaken his conviction that buying Beats was right for Apple."
"Mickle goes on to reveal that Cook "used the social media fiasco to demand an adjustment to the terms of the deal." Stating "in the days that followed, Apple shaved an estimated $200 million off its offering price. The reduction led staff at Beats to say that Apple had given Dre just enough of a haircut to make sure that he did not become a hip-hop billionaire."
