News began circulating yesterday that tech giant Apple was looking to acquire Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine‘s Beats By Dre company for a cool $3.2 billion. Although the deal hasn’t been publicly announced yet, Dre basically confirmed it will happen while chilling in the studio with Tyrese.
Apple will not only acquire the headphone line but the recently-launched Beats music service. This will be Apple’s biggest acquisition yet.
Dre’s stake in Beats currently stands at somewhere around 20-25%; Forbes valued the company at $2 billion in their latest rounds of estimates.
A sale for $3.2 billion would nearly double the value of Dre’s holdings, though capital gains taxes could take a bite out of his big payday, likely leaving him with a net worth in the neighborhood of $800 million. It’s not quite enough to land on the Forbes 400, but it would easily make him hip-hop’s richest man, topping current champion Diddy by $100 million.
