Online sleuths discovered information on Drake’s businesses and other properties during his battle with rival Kendrick Lamar, located in Los Angeles, which caused a stir on social media.
The two well-known rappers, who are regarded as the greatest of their generation, traded a number of diss recordings in April and May in which they revealed their personal grievances.
Online fan chatter prompted some of Drake’s detractors to publish publicly accessible U.S. documents, disclosing personal and financial information about the 37-year-old musician from Toronto. CBC News examined the multi-Grammy winning artist and his business transactions south of the border after obtaining a collection of related documents from the American data goliath LexisNexis, Pacer, and others.
The records have sparked a lot of attention because of Drake’s numerous enterprises and what some have said is an excessive use of limited liability organizations (LLC). An LLC is a kind of organization that enables a person to retain ownership of an owned firm while enabling them to keep their personal assets and wealth separate.
38 LLCs were among the roughly 52 entities that Drake had incorporated, according to the CBC News search.
Several LLCsHowever, analysts assert that having numerous LLCs or other established companies is a reasonable business practice for an individual such as Drake, who is estimated to be worth $250 million.
“People with extremely high net worth frequently have an excessive number of LLCs,” senior corporate counsel Robert Kleinfeldt remarked counsel at U.S. law firm Romano Law.
“Donald Trump has quite a few of them… That is a form of asset protection: When you have that kind of net worth, you kind of have a bull’s eye or a target on you for what can be frivolous lawsuits at times.
“It’s honestly advisable in many instances, when you have that kind of net worth,” said Kleinfeldt about Drake’s business practices. “It’s a good way of protecting yourself from potential creditors trying to reach your assets through no fault of your own, whatever the case may be.”
There are several clear themes among some of the 52 entities’ names. Others are mysterious.
For example, one of the first viral tweets drew attention to the ominous name of Silence Policy, LLC, which listed the Toronto rapper as its manager. There are no surviving websites or other documentation for the company, which has shut down, other than in online, corporate databases. Its former address (which is the same for almost all of the 52 companies) is a building complex in Beverly Hills which counts Playboy offices and several Hollywood accounting firms as tenants.
There are nine companies referencing the name DreamCrew — Drake’s well-known media company, part of the teams behind Netflix’s Top Boy and HBO’s Euphoria — and 18 beginning with or including ADG, a nod to Drake’s initials, his legal name being Aubrey Drake Graham.
There were an additional four companies whose names begin with Away From Home, a reference to a song on one of Drake’s latest studio albums and three using the name Frozen Moments, which at one point was speculated by at least one outlet to be a personal record label.
At least three companies made mention of or allude to owls. The golden stencil image of the nocturnal bird is the globally recognized symbol of Drake’s OVO Sound record label.
And according to the list of incorporated companies there is an Owl Creative Holdings, LLC showing Drake as the manager, and the oddly named Strix S-Corp. In classical mythology a strix is a sort of owl-like creature known for feeding on the blood of humans.
Dividing a larger business into multiple companies allows people like Drake to protect each of those ventures from being affected by another if it comes under legal pressure and funds are targeted.
“You want to keep every single one of those businesses in effect, well, segregated,” said Jonathan Garbutt, a Canadian tax lawyer with Dominion Tax Law, which has practises in Toronto and Calgary.
That way, “any risks related to that project and — getting sued or having, you know, going broke or anything to do with that particular project — are isolated to that particular project and the assets of that particular entity.”
L.A. mansion, Florida condo
Since Lamar made the art for one of his diss tracks an image of Drake’s Toronto home, Drake’s properties have also become a topic of conversation, which the Toronto rapper has frequently bragged about in his music.
TMZ reported earlier this month that Drake has re-listed his multimillion-dollar mansion in Beverly Hills, Calif. — which some have taken notice of in light of it being in Lamar’s home state.
While he reportedly owns more homes elsewhere in the U.S., the records obtained by CBC News show two of Drake’s former properties: an L.A. mansion he sold in 2022 and a Florida property he sold in 2012.
In his 2011 track The Motto Drake raps that he owns “a condo up on Biscayne” in Miami. In that same year, Drake bought two Miami condos on Biscayne Boulevard, side-by-side units purchased for a combined cost of $1.9 million US, then renovated into one and flipped to former NBA player Mario Chalmers in 2012 for $2.4 million US.
According to public documents, Drake bought the condos from the now-defunct Florida developer Leviev Boymelgreen Marquis Developers LLC, which was a partnership between controversial businessmen Lev Leviev and Shaya Boymelgreen.
Leviev and Boymelgreen have been linked to the illegal construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank — including in a 2008 Quebec court case which was later dismissed, after courts decided the case would be better litigated in the Israeli judicial system. UNICEF, Oxfam and the U.S. investment firm BlackRock cut ties with Leviev after the allegations.
Representatives for neither Boymelgreen or Leviev returned multiple requests for comment about their sale of condos to Drake and their involvement in West Bank settlements.
Drake’s public relations team declined to comment to CBC News on the record about his many companies or about the Miami condos.