Bombshell! P. Diddy Made Dr. Dre Lose $200 Million In Apple Deal
May 6 2022, Published 1:31 p.m. ET
Rapper P. Diddy reportedly made Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine lose upwards of $200 million when the pair’s Beats Electronics venture made a groundbreaking multi-billion-dollar deal with Tim Cook and Apple in 2014.
That is the bombshell claim made by New York Times reporter Tripp Mickle in his newly released book After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul, which blames Diddy directly for Apple shaving $200 million off of their $3.2 billion dollar agreement to purchase Dre and Iovine’s Beats Electronics.
According to Mickle, while the deal between Apple and Dre and Iovine was still being finalized, Iovine called a meeting at his house in Beverly Hills not only announcing the monumental $3.2 billion deal, but also cautioning the Beats Electronic team not to leak news of the deal until it was official.
“It was a sum that Iovine and Dre could barely fathom,” Mickle wrote in an excerpt of his new book. “As the lawyers worked through final details, Iovine summoned the leadership team of Beats to his home near Beverly Hills.”
“At 2:00 a.m., 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,” Mickle wrote. “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 Cook, he summoned Iovine and Dre to Cupertino,” Mickle continued. “He invited them into a conference room for a private conversation. Iovine was anxious and afraid that Cook was going to kill the deal.”
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“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.”
Rather than kill the deal outright, Cook ultimately decided to cut the agreement from $3.2 billion to $3 billion – losing Dre and Iovine $200 million and killing Dre’s hopes of becoming “the first billionaire in Hip-Hop.”
