Jake Paul has made a massive name for himself as an internet celebrity and has used his fame to get into the world of professional boxing.
Using the combination of love from his fans and hate from angry onlookers, Paul has found success in nearly every aspect of his career as a public figure.
While most will credit his success to his brother’s initial success on social media platforms, such as YouTube and Vine.
Others assume that the Paul brothers’ success comes from plenty of financial support from their parents.
Was Jake Paul Born Rich?
No, Jake Paul wasn’t born rich, but he wasn’t poor.
Both of the Paul brothers’ parents were successful real estate agents.
After Paul’s boxing match with Ben Askren, he told Snoop Dogg that he had grown up poor and on the dangerous streets of Westlake, Ohio.
An old neighbor of Paul’s ended up posting a video claiming that all of Paul’s claims during that interview were false, and he even drove down the street that they lived on.
Jake Paul grew up in an affluent, suburban town.
In reality, Paul lived in a large, two-story home with a four-car garage and massive yard.
Paul also claimed that he had been bullied in school, but many of his past classmates have claimed that he was the one who bullied people.
It was during high school that Jake Paul originally found success on Vine, creating prank videos and vlogs.
Vine was a social media platform where people would make short videos that would repeat automatically.
When Vine was quit being available for users, both of the Paul brothers made the switch to YouTube, like many of the other former stars of Vine.
Jake Paul found massive success on the new platform, gaining him 20 million followers on YouTube and an acting contract with Disney.
As Paul began to see more success, he also began to be seen more as problematic and troublesome.
It even got to the point that Disney decided to release him from his contract due to the decisions he was making.
Now, Jake Paul has a net worth of $30 million, which makes him just $5 million behind his older brother, Logan Paul.
Jake Paul On Vine
Vine was the birthplace of many popular internet celebrities and had plenty of new talent to search through.
Internet stars like Liza Koshy, Shawn Mendes, and King Bach all rose to fame on Vine.
Most Vine stars have transitioned to different platforms or gone into new industries, such as film and music.
With support from Twitter, Vine was released on January 24th, 2013.
Jake Paul was a massive creator on the platform, right alongside his older brother.
He was known for being over-the-top and partying hard, even early on in his career.
Paul was able to gain 5.3 million followers from the prank videos he made with his friends.
During his time on Vine, he amassed two billion viewers on the one app alone.
Many people credit the speed at which Jake Paul found success to his older brother’s success on the platform, but it was Jake Paul who kept his followers coming back for more.
In October of 2016, Twitter announced its decision to discontinue the Vine app.
After Facebook had bought Instagram, they turned it into a competitor platform killer.
With Instagram’s new addition of videos that would play on repeat, Facebook killed Twitter’s attempt at expanding its reach into different audiences.
Fans of Vine were concerned for their favorite creator during the transition, but nobody was worried about Jake or Logan Paul’s success.
The fiercely loyal communities that the Paul brothers had built up were more than willing to support them in whatever they did.
Disney had already reached out to Jake Paul about accepting a role on one of the shows that Disney Channel was producing.
Paul also chose to take his online audience over to YouTube, which helped his channel grow even further.
Vine was only the beginning of what Jake Paul had planned.
His Time With Disney Channel
In 2013, Jake Paul was given a role on the live-action comedy show Bizaardvark that premiered on the Disney Channel.
The show followed two young girls, played by Madison Hu and Olivia Rodrigo, who became a popular band on social media.
Jake Paul plays the role of Dirk Mann, a fellow social media star who specializes in making challenge videos.
The show was a massive success, collecting 60 million viewers, which were half children and half curious adults who wanted to see how well Paul would do.
However, Paul only lasted 18 months on the show before he was asked to leave the production.
The decision came after the multiple cases of being a public nuisance.
This was around the time that Jake Paul’s channel went from being a prank channel to being more focused on drama and controversy.
Many of the cases that led to his firing from the Disney show were based on the actions he would choose to do at the mansion he was renting.
Paul invited fans to his location, and they crowded the streets so intensely that Paul’s neighbors couldn’t leave their homes.
Paul and his friends who rented the mansion with him were also lighting furniture on fire in a drained swimming pool and had dirt bike races around the property.
This same group of friends also helped Paul ambush a news reporter and their crew.
Paul climbed on top of the news crew’s van and shot t-shirts at them with a t-shirt cannon.
The increasing number of complaints about Jake Paul’s behavior outside of the show from concerned parents and the increasingly negative public image that he was creating for himself led Disney to fire Paul, despite the internet celebrity attempting to claim otherwise.
His Success On YouTube
Jake Paul officially made the switch from Vine to YouTube on May 15th, 2014.
He originally had more than 20 million subscribers when he finally made the transition.
YouTube proved to be an excellent business move because YouTube had way more users than Vine and allowed for more creative freedom.
With this newfound freedom, Jake Paul decided to release more vlogs and rap music.
His fans loved the closer look into how he lived his life, but his videos ended up becoming a major source of controversy.
During his time on YouTube, Jake Paul formed Team10, which was a collaborative effort between many different online content creators over the years.
The original group was Alissa Violet, Alex Lange, Neels Visser, and the Dobre twins.
There were many controversies that ended up causing Team10 to split, which included everything from privacy and security problems to infidelity.
Luckily, Paul still managed to use his collaborative efforts with Team10 to his advantage.
On YouTube, Paul released multiple songs, which started with It’s Everyday Bro.
He later remixed the song, taking out the parts with other Team10 members and replacing their parts with a freestyle rap from Gucci Mane.
He also posted music videos for his songs Ohio Fried Chicken, Jerika, and Litmas in 2017.
Paul later produced a song inspired by his breakup with singer Erika Costell called I’m Single.
That same year, he released a collaborative song called These Days with Adam Quinn, Lauren Dascalo, Brandon Amato, Payton Caci, and Mikahl Caci.
A year after These Days was released, it was taken off of all notable streaming platforms.
When Jake Paul signed with LiveXLive Music Streaming Network, he agreed to let them have all streaming rights to his music.
You can still find the song on Jake Paul’s YouTube channel.
His Boxing Career
After gaining billions of views on his YouTube channel, Jake Paul was ready to break into a new entertainment industry.
His music only really seemed to get popular on YouTube thanks to the devotion of his fans and his haters.
Jake Paul knows that people love to hate him, and he takes it in stride.
He learned early on how much money could be made from gambling on boxing, so Paul threw himself into the boxing ring.
Both people who loved and those who hated him were curious to see how well Jake Paul could fight.
His fans wanted to watch him pummel his opponents, and his haters wanted to watch him get taught a lesson.
The first boxing match that Jake Paul set up was the sibling duos of Jake and Logan Paul and Deji Olatunji and KSI.
Jake Paul and Deji Olatunji were posed against each other because they were each the younger of the two sets of siblings.
Paul ended up winning the match against Olatunji with a technical knockout after five rounds of fighting.
Logan Paul and KSI ended up tied after six three-minute rounds.
With nearly 800,000 pay-per-view viewers and 15,000 live viewers, each participant in that fight walked home with more than enough money.
In December of 2019, Jake Paul began his professional boxing career with a fight against fellow YouTuber AnEsonGib. Paul was able to secure the win in the first round, after only a little more than two minutes.
In an undercard battle for Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr, Jake Paul fought Nate Robinson.
This was the fight that made everyone recognize the boxing talent that Jake Paul had.
Nate Robinson was a professional boxer with years of experience, yet Paul managed to knock him out.
Paul went on to even beat two welterweight champions.
The FBI Raid At Paul’s Mansion
During a raid conducted by an FBI SWAT team at Jake Paul’s mansion, authorities seized multiple firearms from his possession.
The raid was brought on by investigation into a looting case at a mall in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Paul had posted videos of himself and his friends with weapons and looting stores while protests were going on.
The investigators had to use tactics involved with high-risk entries, anticipating that Jake Paul and his friends could potentially become violent.
During their search, officers found multiple firearms within the home.
There were at least five long firearms seen being carried out of Calabasas mansion.
The FBI SWAT team took an armored SWAT truck, a dark van, and a truck with multiple camouflaged agents riding in the back.
By June, it had been decided that Paul would only be receiving misdemeanor charges for the riot at the Scottsdale mall.
However, Paul had also recently racked up even more charges which include being a participant in a physical altercation in Scottsdale Fashion Square, criminal trespass, and unlawful assembly.
However, Arizona ended up dropping all of the charges against Paul in favor of him being sued on a federal level, rather than a state level.
Paul’s defense against the whole situation has been that he did not participate in any of the charges that are being claimed, but rather simply filmed it all happening around him.
During the same time as all of the investigations that were going on, Jake Paul decided to throw massive parties at his Calabasas mansion during the lockdown.
Partygoers took no safety measures and were swinging from a raised excavator crane.
Despite all the trouble that Paul was causing, it only seemed to help increase his popularity.
His actions have become a common reason for professional boxers to accept matches from him.
The Legacy Of Edfluence
Jake Paul is not scared away by the potential of controversy or allegations, but rather, he uses them to fuel his other business ventures.
In 2018, Jake Paul created an educational program for those who wanted to find success on social media.
The program was called Edfluence and it was targeted towards teens and young adults who wanted to find themselves in the same position as their instructor, Jake Paul.
Edfluence offered short videos from the members of Team10 and how they felt they had reached the point of success they were at.
Users would start the program by taking a personality test that was as deep as a personality quiz on BuzzFeed.
Although there are four different categories that a student of the program could land themselves in, there was no difference between the courses.
You could still watch all of the videos available on the site.
The admission fee for this program was $7 per person, which would unlock a video of Jake Paul giving out basic advice for influencers that a viewer could find anywhere on the internet for free and in more detail.
If you wanted to unlock the full course, you were going to have to pay $57 to become a member of the inner circle.
This meant that members got 12 additional chapters of short videos that they could watch and learn from.
Many consumers complained that the advice never got any better than what they had seen for free.
When talking about Twitter, Jake Paul offers the advice of making your tweets funny to increase viewer interaction.
The team behind Edfluence claimed it was a massive success, making plenty of money from the admission and membership fees on Twitter.
No Denying His Success
Despite whatever morally questionable decisions that Jake Paul makes, he still manages to find a way to make the situation turn him a profit.
Jake Paul knows that a lot of his success comes from people who keep a curious eye on him, waiting to watch him fail.
In the short time that Jake Paul has boxed, he has managed to make $20 million from boxing alone.
Only a third of his wealth was made during his time on Vine, Disney Channel, or YouTube.
He has proven to the world that he is an entertainment powerhouse.
Although Jake Paul has managed to find a huge amount of success at an extremely young age, his criminal record could get in the way of him being able to live the way that he wants to.
Paying for all those legal fees may eventually end up eating away at his wealth.
If it weren’t for all the irresponsible decisions that Paul makes, more people would be willing to recognize the talent that he has inside the boxing ring.
The future of any boxer is never certain, but the legacy that Jake Paul will leave behind will be monumental.
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