Damon “Dame” Dash co-founded the Roc-A-Fella label and made his millions via a number of media-related enterprises, but his net worth in 2022 is an estimated $100,000. What happened?
DAME DASH’S NET WORTH REPORTEDLY PEAKED AT $50 MILLION
Dash’s career in the music and media industries has been more illustrious than most. He served as Jay-Z’s manager and business partner at Roc-A-Fella Records and, in 1999, organised a tour for him that made $19 million – profit.
He later founded DD172, a sprawling media collective comprising a magazine, a web design firm, a record label division, and an art gallery.
But things soon changed. As NY Mag wrote in 2006, “even happy couples aren’t immune to divorce”. In 2004, Def Jam Recordings bought up the half of Roc-A-Fella it didn’t already own, and Jay-Z became its president.
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A year later, Jay-Z bought Damon Dash out of Rocawear, the hip-hip clothing line they started together five years earlier. That buyout was worth nearly $20 million which, combined with the similar sum he’d made on Jay-Z’s 1999 tour, landed Dash a good distance from the New York City barbershop floors he swept as a teenager in order to buy sneakers and shirts.
In 2006, NY Mag quoted Dash as estimating his net worth was “about $50 million”.
LEGAL AND CUSTODIAL ISSUES CAUSE DAMON DASH’S NET WORTH TO PLUMMET
Dash and his first wife Rachel Roy divorced after four years of marriage. They had dated before Damon’s relationship with late R&B singer Aaliyah.
Heavy describes the aftermath of their divorce as a “bitter custody battle”; they have two daughters, Ava and Tallulah. TMZ has more on that particular period of Dash’s life.
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He has five children in total: Damon Dash II (aka Boogie), Tallulah, Ava, Lucky and Dusko.
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In 2012, rapper Curren$y sued Damon Dash for $1.5 million; two years later, he was required to pay Linda Williams, the mother of his eldest son, $50,000; other suits followed in 2015 (involving Rachel Roy), 2018 (involving Lee Daniels) and 2019. The latter had to do with child support payments.
One of his Manhattan apartments, a Tribeca duplex, went under the hammer in 2010 at a foreclosure auction. It sold for $5.5 million. The New York Post writes that he had failed to stay up to date with mortgage payments.
According to Celebrity Net Worth, in August 2015, Damon Dash owed more than $4 million in taxes to the state of New York.
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DASH SIGNED KANYE WEST TO ROC-A-FELLA IN THE EARLY 2000S
In a recent episode of Fox Sports’ Club Shay Shay, Dame Dash revealed that he had no expectation that Kanye would become a global phenomenon in the way he has. But he did sign him.
“I never expected that in a billion years,” he said. “I expected other people that were in my crew to be Kanye – I expected someone to do those things, but I didn’t know it would be him.”
He continued: “I think this is the right time for [Jeen-Yuhs to come out] because you get insight into who Kanye is, especially because he’s so public. He’s turned into our new Michael Jackson. Whether that’s negative or positive, but that’s just is what it is,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting all that from Kanye.”