The Richest Black Couples In America
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NewsTranscript
00:00Jay-Z and Beyonce hold 3.8 billion dollars. Michael Jordan and Yvette Prieto clear 4.6.
00:06Robert F. Smith paid off an entire graduating class and still has 10 billion left. Yet one
00:11couple beats all three of them and almost nobody in America can tell you their names. But I will.
00:18Rihanna and A.P. Rocky. A makeup line sold 100 million dollars of product in about 40 days.
00:25Not a record. Not a tour. Foundation and lip gloss. That launch is the reason Forbes carries
00:30Rihanna's real-time net worth at 1.028 billion dollars with her partner A.P. Rocky credited
00:36at about 35 million beside her. She built Fenty Beauty in 2017 with the French luxury giant LVMH
00:43through its kendo division and she kept roughly half the company. The pitch was simple and nobody
00:47big had done it properly. 40 shades of foundation on day one. So women who had never been served by
00:53a beauty counter could finally find their own skin on the shelf. First year revenue landed near 570
00:59million dollars. Two years later she ran the same play again with Savage X Fenty, her lingerie label,
01:04where Forbes still credits her with an estimated 28% stake. That business raised 125 million dollars
01:11in early 2022 at a valuation near 1 billion. Fenty Skin and Fenty Hair followed. Her music catalog still
01:18pays, but she has not released an album since 2016 and the money stopped depending on it a long time
01:24ago. The fortune has not only climbed. In 2021, Forbes carried her at about 1.7 billion dollars.
01:30Then Fenty Beauty sales flattened. Savage X Fenty went through leadership turnover and Forbes trimmed
01:36her by roughly 400 million. She still sits on the list of America's richest self-made women at around
01:41number 39 with a perfect 10 out of 10 self-made score and Forbes lists her citizenship as Barbados
01:47while she lives and builds in Los Angeles. Rakim Athalaston Mayers grew up in Harlem and became a
01:53P-Rocky and his 35 million came from music, fashion work with Puma and Ray-Ban and acting. He has
01:59spoken
01:59about the gap between them with no defensiveness at all, saying his woman has billions while he has
02:04multi-millions and that her success is never his demise. They have never married. They share three
02:08children, RZA, Riot Rose, and their daughter Rocky Irish, born in September 2025, and they raised them
02:15in a Beverly Hills colonial the couple assembled in 2021 for about 13.8 million dollars. One billion
02:22dollars, built on a product that sits in bathroom cabinets in every country on earth. The next fortune
02:27on this list is bigger, and it was built on something nobody notices at all, a button that finds a
02:31free
02:32hour in your calendar. The man who owns it is worth 1.4 billion dollars, and nobody on earth knows
02:37what
02:38his wife looks like. Tope Awatona and his wife. He was 12 years old when his father was killed in
02:46a carjacking
02:47in Lagos. 30 years later, Forbes carries Tope Awatona in the range of 1.35 to 1.4 billion dollars,
02:53one of the
02:54wealthiest African-born immigrants in the United States, built on a company he owns the majority of. The road there
02:59was
03:00long and full of failures. After his father's death, the family moved to the Atlanta area, and he took a
03:05business degree at the
03:06University of Georgia. He sold for IBM, then Perceptive Software, then EMC, and on the side he kept trying to
03:12start something. Projectors failed, garden tools failed. These were years of his life, not weekend
03:17experiments. In 2013 he landed on something plain. He hated trading emails to find a meeting time, so he
03:23built software that handled it and named it Calendly. Funding it nearly wiped him out. He poured in his
03:28life savings of about $200,000, then went into his retirement account, then into credit. For years there
03:35were no investors at all, just him and the product. The payoff came in 2021. Calendly raised $350 million
03:42from OpenView and Iconic at a $3 billion valuation, and because he still held the majority of his own
03:47company, that one round made him a billionaire. Forbes scores him a perfect 10 for being self-made.
03:52He has since been named to the Forbes BLK 50, honored as a Carnegie-grade immigrant, and inducted into the
03:58Georgia Technology Hall of Fame, and he still runs the company out of Atlanta. Then there is the woman
04:02he married, and this is where the trail goes cold. Forbes lists him as married and says nothing more.
04:07Wikipedia lists him as married and says nothing more. No first name anywhere, no occupation,
04:12no wedding date, no photograph in any credible outlet. Nigerian sites write Mrs. Awatona and report
04:18that he has children and guards his family closely, and they cite no source you can follow.
04:22He is one of the most private billionaires in America. He talks openly about the carjacking,
04:27about the failed businesses, about the credit card debt, and about the day the wire cleared.
04:31About his wife he has said nothing at all, and by every sign she has asked for nothing else. There
04:36are billionaires who court cameras and billionaires who build quietly, and the man who owns the world's
04:41scheduling software sits firmly in the second group, a billion four, and half of this couple has
04:45never been photographed. The next household is the opposite in every way. Both names are famous,
04:50both businesses are public, and the wife built a nine-figure fortune that has nothing to do with
04:55her husband's jump shot. LeBron James and Savannah James He has earned more than 580 million dollars
05:05playing basketball, and that is the smaller half of the story. Forbes lists LeBron James at about 1.42
05:11billion dollars, the first active NBA player ever to cross into billionaire territory while still playing,
05:17with Savannah James credited at roughly 100 million in her own right. Together that puts the James
05:22family near 1.4 billion, though more conservative counts place his side closer to 850 million. His
05:28money runs on equity, not salary. Where most athletes take the endorsement check, he kept asking for a
05:34piece of the company instead, and it compounded for 20 years. A lifetime partnership with Nike. Early
05:39ownership in Beats by Dre before Apple bought it. A steak and Blaze pizza that turned a small investment
05:45into a chain, a piece of Fenway Sports Group, which owns the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club,
05:50sometimes valued near 90 million dollars on its own. His media company, Spring Hill, built to own the
05:55stories rather than star in them. Restaurant money, including a 2026 steak in Mike's Red Tacos. Forbes has
06:02said he has taken in more than 1 billion dollars before taxes away from the court. By the summer of
06:072026,
06:08he left the Lakers and signed a two-year veteran minimum deal worth 8 million dollars with the
06:13Philadelphia 76ers, calling it his last decision. At that point, the contract was a ring chase,
06:18not income. Savannah built her 100 million separately, and she started small enough that
06:22most people missed it. The Juice Spot, a single smoothie shop in Miami during the heat years,
06:27home court furniture with American Signature, investments in Lobo's 1,707 Tequila,
06:33the Web3 startup Lockerverse, and the deodorant brand NEZ. In 2025, she launched the clinical
06:39skincare line Reframe. In 2026, she folded her women's community brand and her podcast into a
06:45holding company called Signed, backed by Jay-Z's Marcy Penn Capital, and became an investor in the
06:50professional women's volleyball franchise LOVB Los Angeles. They met as teenagers in Akron, had their
06:56first son in 2004 while he was still in high school, and married on September 14, 2013. They have three
07:02children, Bronnie, Bryce Maximus, and Jurinova. Their family foundation runs the I Promise School
07:08back in Akron, with scholarship commitments often cited above 40 million dollars, and she founded a
07:14mentorship program there for local girls called Women of Our Future. Thirty years before LeBron ever
07:19signed a shoe deal, another point guard ran this exact playbook first. He started it the week,
07:24the entire world assumed he was about to die.
07:27Magic Johnson and Cookie Johnson
07:31Seven weeks after his wedding, Irvin Johnson stood in front of the cameras and told the world
07:36he had tested positive for HIV. That was November 7, 1991. He was 32, sponsors were already writing him
07:43off, and his 15-year NBA career had paid him roughly 40 million dollars. Almost every other dollar he owns
07:50was made after that day. Forbes has listed him as a billionaire since October 2023, with recent figures
07:56around 1.5 to 1.6 billion, and Cookie Johnson is estimated at about 150 million. She was pregnant
08:03when he made the announcement. She stayed, she and the baby tested negative, and their son EJ was born
08:08the following June. In September 2026, the two of them marked 35 years of marriage. He has said many times
08:15that her decision to stay is the reason he is still here. Then he went to work, and the plan
08:20was one
08:20nobody else in his position was running. Magic Johnson Enterprises, founded in 1987,
08:26targeted the neighborhoods every other investor had written off. Magic Johnson Theaters put multiplexes
08:31where there were none. Starbucks locations opened in black neighborhoods through a joint venture he
08:35later sold. Gyms followed, then food service including Sodexo Magic, feeding airports and stadiums.
08:42Then came the teams, a minority stake in the Los Angeles Dodgers through the Guggenheim Group in 2012,
08:48the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks, LAFC in Major League Soccer, later a piece of the Washington
08:53Commander's ownership group. The move that carried him past a billion was not sports at all. In 2015,
09:00he took a controlling stake of roughly 60 percent in Equitrust Life Insurance, and under that ownership
09:05the company's assets grew from the mid-teens of billions into the 26 to 33 billion dollar range.
09:11Control moved to Amistad Financial Group in 2025, tied to a longtime executive of his,
09:16and reporting through 2026, has examined loans and related party questions involving Equitrust
09:21and connected insurers. Johnson has not been accused of any wrongdoing, and the terms of
09:26the transfer have not been disclosed. Cookie built her own lane while all of that ran. In 2009,
09:31she launched the premium denim line CJ by Cookie Johnson for women who could never find jeans that fit,
09:37and Nordstrom carried it. In 2016, she published her memoir, Believing in Magic. She sits on the
09:42Magic Johnson Foundation board and speaks on HIV prevention in black communities. 35 years of
09:48marriage, and it is still not the longest partnership on this list. One couple has been
09:52together since 1986 without ever getting married, and they are worth twice as much.
09:58Oprah Winfrey and Stedman Graham
10:02In 1992, Stedman Graham proposed at her Indiana farmhouse. She said yes, a wedding was set for
10:08the following year, and it quietly never happened. 34 years later, they are still together. The fortune
10:13behind that partnership belongs almost entirely to her. Oprah Winfrey is worth roughly 3.2 to 3.4
10:20billion dollars. The richest black woman in America with Graham estimated at about 10 million,
10:25for a household near 3.4 billion. Hers came from ownership rather than salary, which was unheard
10:30of for a television host at the time. She owned her show, she owned Harpo Productions. She owned a
10:35large slice of the OWN Network before selling it down, held a major stake in Weight Watchers, and sits
10:41on a great deal of very expensive California land. Her money has grown so steadily that she has now
10:46fallen off the Forbes 400 without losing a cent, because the 2026 cutoff to make that list climb
10:52to 4.4 billion dollars. Graham's 10 million is his own work, and that matters more than the size
10:58of it. He founded S. Graham & Associates in Chicago in 1988. Before her, he served in the U.S.
11:03Army,
11:04played basketball in Europe, worked in corrections and public relations, and earned a master's in
11:09education. In 1985, he started Athletes Against Drugs, which has awarded more than 1.5 million dollars
11:15in scholarships. He has written about a dozen books around a framework he calls Identity Leadership,
11:20built on the idea that you cannot lead others until you lead yourself, and he has taught it
11:24at Northwestern's Kellogg School. They met in 1986, she had seen him around Chicago,
11:29and decided he was too handsome to be worth the trouble. They ended up in the same house visiting
11:33a mutual friend who was dying of AIDS, and when they left together she asked him out for a beer,
11:38he declined because he does not drink. That December they appeared in public together for the
11:43first time at the Apollo. When he finally proposed, he told her plainly that he wanted her to marry him,
11:47and thought it was time. She has said since that what she wanted was to be asked, that the show
11:52came
11:52first, and that a marriage would likely have ended them. She calls it a spiritual partnership between
11:57equals. They have no children together, and she points to her Leadership Academy for Girls in South
12:02Africa as where that went instead. Home is the promised land in Montecito, grown out from a 50
12:07million dollar purchase of 42 acres in 2001. For decades, hers was the biggest number in black
12:13entertainment, and nothing came close. Then in December 2025, a woman from Houston crossed a billion
12:19dollars on her own, and her husband had crossed it six years before her. Jay-Z and Beyonce
12:28Two billionaires live in the same house, in the entire history of recorded music that has never happened
12:33before. Forbes carries Jay-Z at about 2.805 billion dollars and declared Beyonce a billionaire in
12:40December 2025, listing her at 1 billion, with one 2026 tally of the richest black women placing her as
12:46high as 1.4 billion. The household runs to 3.8 billion dollars and ranks as the number one celebrity
12:52couple in the world, ahead of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey. He became hip-hop's first confirmed
12:57billionaire in 2019 and more than doubled it after mostly by selling liquor. The pattern repeats across
13:03everything he touches, own it outright, then sell a piece at the top. He controls his own publishing
13:08and masters, which almost no rapper of his era managed. Roc Nation handles management, label,
13:13publishing, touring, and sports. He sold 50% of the champagne brand Armand de Brignac to LVMH in 2021,
13:20and his stake in Doucet Cognac to Bacardi in 2023, for a figure reported in the hundreds of millions. He
13:26bought
13:27Tidal, rebuilt it, and sold a large piece with both of them taking cash out. He runs Marcipen,
13:32the venture firm named for the Brooklyn projects he grew up in. Add the 4040 Club,
13:36stakes tied to Uber, Block, and Fanatics, and a Basquiat collection. She runs the same model harder.
13:42Parkwood Entertainment, founded in 2010, keeps her management and production in-house,
13:46and she fronts the cost of her own tours and films, so the back end stays hers. The Renaissance World
13:52Tour in 2023 grossed around $579 to $600 million. The Cowboy Carter Tour in 2025 was reported as the
14:00highest-grossing country tour ever recorded, with ticket sales around $400 to $450 million plus
14:06roughly $50 million in merchandise. Forbes estimated she personally earned about $148 million before
14:12taxes in 2025. On top of that sit Secred Hair Care, Sir Davis Whiskey with Moet Hennessy,
14:18the Wound Down Ivy Park line with Adidas, a concert film deal with AMC, and a Netflix NFL performance
14:24reported in the tens of millions. They married in 2008 and have three children, Blue Ivy and the
14:29twins Rumi and Sir. She holds the record for Grammy wins with 35, and the two of them sit first
14:35and
14:35second in all-time nominations, 99 for her and 88 for him. $3.8 billion between them, and they are
14:41still not the top of this list. A man who never sold a record or a bottle of champagne runs
14:46a household
14:46worth almost a billion more, and he did it with one shoe. Michael Jordan and Yvette Prieto
14:55Every pair of Jordans sold anywhere on the planet sends money to one man, and it has been doing that
15:00for 40 years. That is why Forbes lists Michael Jordan at about $4.66 billion, with coverage of
15:07the couple putting the household in the $3.5 to $4.7 billion range. He was the first professional
15:12athlete ever to reach the Forbes 400, and he sits among the richest black people in America. 15 NBA
15:18seasons paid him roughly $90 million. The Nike royalties have paid him hundreds of millions,
15:23with annual payments often reported around $60 million a year, and they keep arriving whether he
15:28works or not. In 2023, he sold his majority stake in the Charlotte Hornets in a deal that valued the
15:33franchise near $3 billion, keeping a minority piece for himself. He co-owns 23XY Racing and NASCAR and
15:40holds positions in DraftKings and Sincoro Tequila. Yvette Prieto arrived from a completely different
15:45world. Born in Cuba in 1978, and raised in Miami, she modeled for houses including Alexander Wang,
15:52and before that she worked in her family's business, in a hospital, and in real estate. In 2002,
15:57a business investment went bad, and she filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Eleven years later,
16:02she married the wealthiest athlete on earth. They met at a Miami nightclub in 2008, and moved in
16:07together the next year. He proposed over Christmas 2011, with a ring reported in the seven figures,
16:12and they married on April 27, 2013, at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda by the Sea in Palm Beach,
16:18in a wedding reported to cost close to $10 million with Usher and Robin Thicke performing.
16:23Their twin daughters Victoria and Isabel arrived in February 2014, and she is stepmother to his three
16:29children from his first marriage. Estimates of her own wealth run anywhere from $6 million to $50
16:34million, depending on how her modeling and business income is counted. Firmer is the
16:38prenuptial agreement, reported to pay her $1 million for every year of marriage, rising to $5 million a
16:43year past the 10-year mark they passed in 2023, while protecting his premarital assets and the Nike
16:49royalties. For all that money they live quietly, in an estate in Jupiter, Florida, with long European
16:54summers in Marbella and the Greek islands aboard a superyacht valued between $115 and $150 million,
17:01$4.66 billion from a sneaker, and there are still two households above them. The next man
17:06walked onto a college stage in 2019 and made 400 students debt-free in a single sentence.
17:13Robert F. Smith and Hope Dwarakshik Smith
17:17The Morehouse College class of 2019 was expecting a commencement speech. What they got was a man
17:22telling them he was paying off every student loan in the room, a bill that came to about $34
17:27million. He could afford it. Robert F. Smith is worth around $10 to $11 billion, the second largest
17:33fortune on this list, with his wife Hope Dwarakshik Smith estimated near $50 million of her own. The
17:38money is in software, and the route there started in a laboratory. Born in Denver in 1962 to two
17:44school teachers and carried to the 1963 March on Washington as an infant. He trained as a chemical
17:49engineer at Cornell, worked at Goodyear and then Kraft where he holds patents on coffee filtration systems,
17:54took an MBA at Columbia, and ran technology mergers at Goldman Sachs through the dot-com years. In 2000,
18:00he left to start Vista Equity Partners in Austin, with a strategy that sounded almost too narrow to
18:05work. Enterprise software and nothing else. Vista grew into one of the best-known software private
18:10equity firms in the world, managing around $100 billion in assets. Around 2018, he passed Oprah to
18:17become the wealthiest African American, and he was the first African American to sign the Giving Pledge.
18:21Cornell's engineering school now carries his name, and large gifts have gone to UNCF,
18:27the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and Susan G. Komen through his Fund II
18:32Foundation. There is a harder chapter in the record. In 2020, after a multi-year investigation into
18:37offshore structures tied to Vista's first fund, Smith entered a non-prosecution agreement. He admitted
18:43failing to report more than $200 million in income in foreign accounts, paid about $139 million in taxes
18:49and penalties, dropped roughly $182 million in claimed charitable refund positions, and agreed
18:54to cooperate. No Vista entity was charged, and he described it as a personal tax matter.
18:59Hope Dworek-Sick-Smith built a career in a different industry entirely. Born in Texas in 1984,
19:05to a Polish father and a Mexican mother, she was crowned Miss Texas Teen America at 16, signed with
19:11Wilhelmina, and modeled for Balenciaga and Versace. She was Playboy's Playmate of the Month in April 2009,
19:17and Playmate of the Year in 2010. She later trained as an esthetician, became a doula,
19:22and around 2019 launched the skincare brand Muthah, writing a book on pregnancy and postpartum
19:27care in 2022. They married on July 25, 2015, at Villa Timbrone on Italy's Amalfi Coast,
19:34with John Legend and Seal performing, and they have four children together alongside his three from an
19:39earlier marriage. $11 billion, and there is still one household above them. It belongs to a man whose
19:44father collected trash for a living. David and Thelma Stewart
19:49His car was repossessed out of the company parking lot while he sat inside working. That was the
19:54early 90s, and the company was worldwide technology. As of mid-September 2026, Forbes estimates David
20:00Stewart's net worth at about $12.3 billion, around number 110 on the Forbes 400, and among the five
20:07richest people in St. Louis. In 2024, he topped the list of the richest black Americans, ahead of Robert F.
20:13Smith. The company he co-founded in 1990, with a partner and roughly $250,000, now handles systems
20:20integration, cloud, security, and hardware for Citi, Verizon, Apple, Microsoft, the federal government,
20:27and a long line of Fortune 500 firms. Reported revenue in recent years runs between $17 and $20
20:33billion with more than 10,000 staff, and it is repeatedly cited as the largest black-owned company
20:38in the country by revenue. It has never gone public. He remains founder, chairman, and majority owner,
20:44with a perfect 10 out of 10 self-made score. Everything about the beginning argued against
20:48it. Born in 1951 and raised in Clinton, Missouri, one of eight children, his father worked as a
20:53mechanic, a janitor, and a trash collector. The town was segregated. Separate schools, balcony seating at
20:58the theater, and a public pool he was barred from until 1967. He sold for the railroads, then for FedEx,
21:03where he was named Salesman of the Year and struck out on his own in 1983, buying a small firm
21:09that
21:09audited freight bills. The first years of worldwide technology brought unpaid bills and stretches with
21:14no paycheck at all. Thelma E. Stewart never worked a day in technology. A St. Louis native, she is a
21:20registered nurse who trained at the St. Louis Municipal School of Nursing and began her career
21:24at Homer G. Phillips Hospital in the newborn and premature nursery. She has served on boards including
21:29Variety, the Children's Charity, Girls Inc., and the St. Louis Art Museum. Her son later created
21:35the Thelma Stewart Future Nurse of Excellence Scholarship, full tuition awards built to bring
21:39more African-American students into nursing. Named for the nurse who raised him, they married in 1976.
21:45Their Stewart Family Foundation has run since 2013, funding education, health, the arts, youth programs,
21:50and military families, and instead of sitting on an endowment, they give as the money comes in.
21:54Reportedly passed $100 million. $12.3 billion. No reality show, no brand launch, no arena tour,
22:01a trash collector's son, a hospital nurse, and 50 years of marriage at the very top of black wealth
22:06in America. Loved this video? Click on this card for more.