Your Favorite Rapper is Poor: Just How Rich is Gucci Mane?

Thank God for child support cases. Rappers may exaggerate their annual income on record, but when they're in front of that judge they're not exactly anxious to talk about their ten new cars, and from Nas to Game it's the best way to figure out just how much your favorite rappers are really making.

Case in point, this week Gucci Mane settled his child support case, revealing in the process that he makes approximately $25K a month, or about $300K a year. For the legions of people who hate Gucci based solely on his essentially incomprehensible music alone this confirmation of his cash flow added fuel to their bonfires of hatred, but let's take a deep breath. Just how rich is Gucci Mane?

First, just where is that money coming from? I don't know (precisely), but we can assume it's not coming from music. Unless you're the elite of the elite, no one's really making money purely off music sales anymore, and for damn sure a man who's doing albums with V-Nasty isn't exactly moving major units. Furthermore, it's not like Pepsi is exactly lining up to do deal with a man who just plead guilty to throwing a woman out of a moving car, so there can't be any real sponsorship or licensing money coming in.

That mean's Gucci's racks are the product of playing shows, club appearances and whatever he's raking in from being the head of the So So Icy Brick Squad Click, or whatever the hell is label is named. Nothing pays better than being the boss. Waka Flocka's cutting him checks every time "Round of Applause" gets played on the radio.

Second, it's crucial to realize that we don't know if that $300K is income (total money) or profit (total money after payments). Just take that $28K a month. We already know that he's now paying $2K a month in child support, and that he had to pay an $8K fine for that aforementioned throwing a woman out of a car incident. Throw in his other assorted legal fees, subtract the money he undoubtedly owes Warner Bros. (what, you think he's recouped?), the percentage he owes his publicist and manager (assuming his manager didn't work him like Soulja Boy's did), and suddenly that stack's not looking so tall.

But wait, we're not done yet. Subtract taxes (which he probably doesn't pay), whatever he spends in his entourage, his housing and jewelry, and it's not hard to imagine that Gucci's actually pretty damn close to broke. I obviously don't know the exact details of the man's finances, but on a completely hypothetical level let's assume he loses half of his monthly $28K to child support/lawyers/managers/the label/living expenses. As we recently learned after Dame Dash's Lamborghini got repossessed, a Lambo will run you about $4K a month. So at the most conservative estimate, and I'm being incredibly conservative, he's got about 10K to spend each month. That's nothing to laugh at, but not exactly racks on racks on racks.

Make no mistake, 99% of this country would love to bring in $300K a year, but that really only puts Gucci in the lower class of famous rappers. At the top end Jay pulls down $37 million, so while Gucci's got $28K a month to play with, Jay's got $2.8 million. Hell, Eminem just turned down $6 million for one concert! Or to go outside of rap, the average superintendent of a major city school system in America makes $300K a year, and the average Wall Street banker brings in $900K.

So by all means, continue to be angry that Gucci makes anything more than $0 a year for his terrible rapping, but at the very least we've learned two things today. One, the man's just doesn't have racks on racks on racks, at the most he's got racks on top of bills on top of child support payments. And two, if the only thing you care about in life is making money, you're much better off majoring in Economics than dropping out of college to pursue that rap career.

Plan accordingly.