From “Poor as Hell” to Billionaire: How Tyler Perry Changed Show Business Forever

Tyler Perry invented and polished a product everyone else deemed “low value,” and kept total control over it. 

Tyler Perry is on a mission. It may be a hot July in Atlanta in the middle of a global pandemic, but the writer, director and movie mogul has a deadline. He’s filming an entire season of prime-time television in 11 days. Put that in your pipe, Hollywood. Not that Hollywood ever understood Perry. Even Spike Lee at first dismissed Perry’s “crass slapstick approach” as clown-like, though he later came around. 

The 51-year-old playwright owns everything he ever wrote – at least 1,200 television show episodes, 22 feature films, 24-plus stage plays – as well as a new 330-acre studio lot on Atlanta’s southern edge, two airplanes, and homes in Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He made a deal to sell new content to ViacomCBS for $150 million annually, plus an equity stake in its new streaming service, BET+.

What sort of fortune has a once homeless Black child from an abusive background created? Forbes estimates his net worth at one billion dollars, which...