What does it feel like to take a punch to the face from a legit boxer?
Since turning his attention full time to the sport in 2020, Jake Paul, 27, has absorbed his share of them — first from fellow YouTubers, then pro athletes, then MMA fighters and now from actual boxers.
“Eighty-five percent of the hits you don’t really feel — but then there’s that other 15 percent,” Jake says, munching on an omelet and a bowl of berries on the poolside terrace of his compound in Puerto Rico.
Jake Paul was photographed Sept. 27 and 28 at his gym and home in Dorado, Puerto Rico.
Photographed by Amy Lombard
The island has been home to Jake and his older brother, 29-year-old YouTuber turned WWE wrestler Logan Paul, since late 2020. Many assume it’s to avoid paying federal taxes on passive income, which the territory’s Act 60 allows as a means of promoting local investment. To that, Jake responds, “This is the most beautiful place in the world, and it’s my home and I wouldn’t live somewhere that I don’t absolutely love.” It also happens to be a spot that, like Jake, is obsessed with boxing.
With his wiry blond goatee and a towel wrapped across his torso like a toga, he suggests Zeus sitting atop Mount Olympus. It’s hot out here — a sultry heat that feels much warmer than the temperature, currently 91 degrees.
Jake purchased the home in Dorado — what a local tells me is the “Beverly Hills of Puerto Rico” — in 2023. Old habits being hard to break, the boy who made it big posting outrageous, aspirational content promptly showed it off to his 21 million YouTube followers in a video titled “My New $16,000,000 House.”
It’s a modernist manse, all white walls and marble flooring covered in mats that say “Taj MaPaul.” Massive sculptures of moon men and gorillas line the pool, which features a jacuzzi-sized ice bath. It’s the kind of house Rocky Balboa wouldn’t have been able to afford until Rocky III.
“See, those hard punches cause you to lose your senses a bit,” Jake continues, his personal nutritionist — a former cook to UFC superstar Conor McGregor — hovering nearby. “Then you get blurry vision. It makes you tired in a weird way. I think your body sends oxygen to your brain and it makes you sleepy. It definitely hurts — but that’s the fourth thing you think about. You’re kind of like, ‘Oh, shit. That’s not good. If he lands another one of those, I might start wobbling.’ ”
But what if the punch comes from boxing god Mike Tyson, proprietor of the stealthiest, deadliest uppercut in the sport’s history? The Mike Tyson who famously said, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face”?
That Mike Tyson.
Jake will find out soon enough, when he steps into the ring with the 58-year-old legend on Nov. 15 at AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys.
This is their second attempt at battle. The first was scheduled for July 20 but was postponed after Tyson suffered an ulcer flare-up — the kind of hiccup you might expect for a man pushing 60.
This time around, all parties assure the fight will go on, rain or shine, ulcer or not. More than 70,000 fans will be there to watch it in person. That’s an astounding number for a sport that has been steadily bleeding audience share since its 1980s peak — back when Tyson ruled the planet as the undisputed T. rex of the sport — to faster-paced and flashier MMA fighting.
But that’s just inside the stadium. Outside, an additional 270 million Netflix subscribers will be able to watch the fight from the comfort of their own homes — no PPV fees required — for the mega-streamer’s biggest foray yet into the world of live sports.
How big? If the appeal is to watch Jake — who since his teens, along with Logan, has been a ubiquitous (some might say annoying) online presence with too much money and not enough adult supervision — get pummeled to a pulp by one of the most fearsome fighters to ever climb into a ring, it appears to be working.
While Netflix won’t speak to global viewership expectations, the Super Bowl comes up in off-the-record conversations as an only slightly outlandish aspirational benchmark — and 124 million tuned in for Super Bowl LVIII. (Jake has predicted 25 million, which would make it the most-watched boxing match of all time.)
Netflix and Most Valuable Promotions — the company Jake founded with his manager, former UFC chief financial officer Nakisa Bidarian, 46, in 2021 — won’t say what the purse is. But in true Jake Paul fashion, he let it slip at a press conference that he’s making $40 million for the bout.
Tyson, meanwhile, who oddsmakers have as the underdog — he is 30 years older, after all, and his last two fights resulted in a loss and a draw — is rumored to be making half of that.
Jimmy Kimmel floated the $20 million figure during Tyson’s recent visit to his show, which Tyson did not dispute. In the same interview, Tyson, a big proponent of magic mushrooms and marijuana, also teased, perhaps jokingly, that he could be on some kind of mind-altering substance during the fight. Both are banned substances in sanctioned fights — which this fight is, meaning the outcome will affect their professional records — and the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, which sanctioned the fight, has been put on, uh, high alert.
Despite what the oddsmakers say, however, Bidarian sees the fight as “pretty evenly matched at this stage of their careers — and Jake may not like me saying that.”
Jake was considered a novelty boxer until he knocked out former NBA player Nate Robinson in 2020 and embarked on a legit winning streak. Supported by a serious team of trainers including Theotrice Chambers III (left), he’s now favored against the 58-year-old Mike Tyson.
Photographed by Amy Lombard
Jake has been fighting for only four years, during which he’s had 10 fights and one loss — against Tommy Fury. Then again, Fury has to date been his most serious competition, an imposing professional boxer from a British fighting dynasty (plus a Love Island reality star, matching Jake’s showmanship). Despite Jake having successfully knocked Fury down at one point in the fight, Fury won the match, held with great fanfare in Saudi Arabia in February 2023, by controversial split decision.
Tyson, meanwhile, has not had a sanctioned fight since 2005, when he lost to Irish heavyweight Kevin McBride. He did not fight again until the November 2020 “Lockdown Knockdown.” Held at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tyson and former heavyweight champ Roy Jones Jr. — then already in his 50s — sparred in an exhibition match inside an empty Staples Center in Los Angeles. Unlike Paul vs. Tyson, the smell of blood was not particularly in the air. Despite selling 1.6 million PPV buys and generating $80 million, the fight, which resulted in a draw, was generally considered a snooze.
The one highlight was the undercard, when a then joke of a prospect named Jake Paul took on muscular former NBA player Nate Robinson. Though Robinson, diminutive for a baller at 5-foot-9 (Jake is 6-foot-1), was suffering from kidney disease, he was far and away the favorite — until Paul gave him a one-way ticket to the mat, face-first and unconscious, in the second round. That viral knockout instantly transformed Jake from a boxing joke into somewhat less of a boxing joke with a mean right hook.
Could Jake sustain the momentum? To everyone’s amazement, he did, beating (after mercilessly taunting) UFC fighters Ben Askren, Tyron Woodley and even the mighty MMA champ Anderson Silva. It was all going so well — until Tommy Fury. Naturally, when the opportunity for a Netflix fight arose — discussions came directly out of the success of Untold: Jake Paul the Problem Child, a 2023 Netflix doc about Jake’s unlikely rise in the sport — a Fury rematch was the logical choice. But then Tyson threw his name in the ring.
Tyson (left) and Jake will face off Nov. 15, with viewers tuning in via Netflix.
Cooper Neill/Getty Images
“I think once you hear Mike Tyson’s name as a potential opponent, it’s hard to unhear it,” says Gabe Spitzer, vp at Netflix Sports. “He’s obviously a massive global superstar, and for us being a global company, we’re looking for those big, global events that can add net value to our members anywhere. We started speaking to Mike’s team along with MVP and closed the deal this year right before we announced it.”
With the rumored $60 million between them already in the bank before a single punch is thrown, it could be argued that it doesn’t really matter who knocks whom out — both fighters are coming out winners. But, according to Bidarian, it matters a great deal.
“For Mike Tyson, this is his opportunity for redemption,” he says, laying out the stakes. (Tyson, deep into training, was not available to comment for this story, but he has been openly supportive of Jake in the past, saying in the Netflix doc, “I’m a fan of people that know how to put asses in the seats. … I like to see him talking shit. He’s an antihero. He’s not a villain. He does hero shit, but he just don’t go by heroes’ laws.”) Bidarian, who fully embraces his fighter’s villainous public persona, adds: “People remember his last fight with Jones, sitting on a stool and not getting back up. Imagine, for all those people who want to see Jake Paul get knocked out, if Mike Tyson at 58 comes back and knocks out Jake Paul, he’ll be revered for the rest of his days. He put an end to this YouTuber’s reign.”
And what if the “Problem Child” — Jake’s fighting moniker, which also capitalizes on his bad-boy reputation — comes out on top?
“Now, if Jake does knock out Mike Tyson, sure, there will be a lot of people who are mad,” Bidarian continues. “But there’s also going to be a lot more opportunities for him in the world of boxing.”
Jake with girlfriend Jutta Leerdam
Andre Weening/BSR Agency/Getty Images
Jake is counting on it — and is already looking well past this fight to global boxing domination. His goal is to become a world champion, meaning he’d knock out one of the four top-ranked belt holders in his weight class, cruiserweight. He plans on having that coincide with his girlfriend, Dutch speed skater Jutta Leerdam, 25, winning gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan.
“So in two years, Jutta gets a gold medal and I win the world championship,” Jake tells me, matter-of-factly. “We’d be world champion at the same time.” Beyond that, he wants to own an NFL team — just not his hometown team. “The Browns have a curse — so then I end up drifting to the Chiefs. Travis Kelce, he’s from Cleveland, so I’m a fan,” he says.
World champion. NFL owner. None of this “YouTuber” stuff. Then, finally, no one will call Jake Paul a joke ever again.
Or at least that’s the plan.
***
When he bought his home in what’s known as the “Beverly Hills of Puerto Rico,” Jake touted it to his followers in a video titled “My New $16,000,000 House.”
Photographed by Amy Lombard
To understand how someone like Jake Paul has managed to find himself within striking distance of Mike Tyson’s fists — at least not within the confines of a prank video — you need to go back in time, to childhood, when Jake and Logan, two years his senior, were just rambunctious kids horsing around their home in Westlake, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland.
As teens, the two flaxen-haired boys were naturals at making funny and engaging Vines, the six-second video app that was a precursor to TikTok. In the beginning, they appeared side-by-side in the clips, a sibling comedy duo with a supporting cast of pals. By 2017, when Twitter deactivated Vine, Jake had amassed 5.3 million “Jake Paulers” and 2 billion views. Logan’s following, the “Logang,” ran neck-and-neck with Jake’s. Wherever they took their content — YouTube, Facebook, Instagram — the fans followed.
But the Pauls’ upbeat, slapstick content hid a darkness at home. Their parents, Pam, a nurse, and Greg, a real estate agent — both of whom appear in their videos — divorced when the boys were 7 and 9. It was by all accounts an ugly split. “It was rocky in the beginning — really, really rocky,” says Pam, who has been remarried for 20 years.
“There was mental manipulation and my mom trying to get me on her side, my dad trying to get me on his side,” Jake recalls. “All these games and madness and just psychological craziness.”
It wasn’t until later in life, around his mid-20s, that Jake uncovered through therapy that he had a deep well of unresolved trauma relating to his father. He says his dad physically abused him and his brother from childhood until they left for Los Angeles in their late teens.
“He was punching us, slapping us, throwing us down the stairs, throwing things at us, mental abuse, manipulation,” Jake says.
“Was it a corporal punishment kind of thing?” I ask. “ ‘You’ve done something wrong, so I’m going to hit you?’ ”
“Say he’s on the phone, and my brother and I were whispering to each other. And he’s like, ‘Quit fucking whispering!’ and whips something at my head. There’s punishment and then there’s abuse. He just took his anger out on us. He’s going through a divorce, losing everything — and we were the closest people to him,” he says.
Jake Paul
Photographed by Amy Lombard
Jake says that through therapy he’s managed to make peace with his dad. Despite all of it, father and sons remain close. But Jake suspects whatever is driving him professionally, first in social media and now in boxing, has its seeds in that withholding and abusive relationship. “I think it does create something where you are searching for that approval in other places,” he explains. “I have this lurking energy of needing approval because my dad didn’t give me much. I need to heal that and know that’s there and just love myself more.”
Their father — who declined to speak for this story — also instilled in his sons what Logan describes as “this little rivalry” from a very young age. “As far back as I can remember, my dad was always pitting Jake and I against each other in terms of who could run faster, who could score more touchdowns, who could get higher grades,” Logan says.
It usually was Logan who won. He admits it gave him “a superiority complex” that carried through to adulthood. “At the risk of sounding arrogant,” Logan says, “by high school it was very clear to look at me and think, ‘That kid is going to be successful.’ I was an all-state wrestler, an all-state linebacker, 4.7 GPA. I was going to do something great in my life. When you looked at Jake in high school — who was stealing iPhones, driving in reverse down residential streets with his friends at 50 miles an hour and hitting mailboxes, egging houses with a 1.5 GPA — it wasn’t so clear.”
Like Jake, Logan has grown since the days of early viral fame, when — in the spirit of a sibling rivalry encouraged by their management teams — he’d think nothing of releasing a diss track about sleeping with his brother’s ex-girlfriend, as he did in 2017 with “The Fall of Jake Paul” (“Uh-oh, that’s Alissa Violet, used to be your chick/Now she in the Logang and you know she on my … team”).
Not to be outdone, Jake hit back with his own song, “It’s Everyday Bro,” a viral track full of rap-star braggadocio that amassed more than 300 million YouTube views despite not being particularly good.
“It wasn’t until my mid-20s that I realized I had been causing my younger brother a lot of pain and I hadn’t been the best brother I could be,” notes Logan, who very recently became a first-time parent with his fiancée, 32-year-old Danish model Nina Agdal, to a baby girl. (He concedes everyone is a bit relieved it wasn’t a boy.)
“Now in my late 20s, I’ve focused on just trying to be there for Jake and love Jake as much as possible. I don’t think many brothers share a connection like ours because of all the shit that we’ve been through, both good and bad,” Logan says.
Jake (right), 19, with older brother Logan, 20, after the two Vine stars relocated to Los Angeles
Tasia Wells/Getty Images
The good and bad ramped up dramatically in 2014, when the Paul brothers’ content was proving so wildly popular, the next logical step was to relocate to Los Angeles to kick-start a career in film and TV. For Jake, then just 17, it meant dropping out of high school.
“It was scary,” recalls Pam, who stayed behind in Ohio. “They were going to do what they wanted regardless. But I just kind of knew that it was the right thing to do for them. There were a lot of sleepless nights, of course, with the fast cars and motorcycles and that kind of thing — but that could have happened here, too.”
Within months of taking up residence in Hollywood — at 1600 Vine, a building that became famous for Vine stars — Jake found Hollywood success, getting cast in 2016 as a version of himself, a YouTuber bro, on the Disney Channel series Bizaardvark, which also introduced the world to a young, aspiring singer-songwriter named Olivia Rodrigo. (“She is a generational talent,” Jake says of Rodrigo, 21, now one of the world’s biggest pop stars. “She would be playing these songs she’d written, and I’m sitting there thinking, ‘What the fuck. This is insane. This girl’s so talented.’ ”)
Jake was soon cast in Disney Channel’s Bizaardvark alongside Olivia Rodrigo
Image Group LA/Disney Channel/Getty Images
Both brothers insist they never set out to become villains. It just kind of happened. In 2017, Jake moved into a rental house in West Hollywood with other overcaffeinated creators signed to his company — it came to be known as the Team 10 house — and felt the need to keep upping the ante, devising wilder and wilder stunts.
He threw a mattress and furniture into an empty pool and lit it on fire. He made his address public, drawing throngs of fans to his residential street. Another time, he jumped on a news van — there to report on complaints from neighbors that the block had become a “war zone” — and mocked the reporter’s shoes. The behavior got him sued by his landlord and fired by Disney.
Looking back, Jake still isn’t quite sure what the big deal was. “I personally wasn’t doing anything harmful in my eyes,” he says. “So I jumped on a news van and made fun of his shoes. I still think that’s hilarious. This is entertainment. We’re in Hollywood. But the narrative became, ‘He’s evil. Look at this fucking asshole. Kill this guy.’ ” If he had to pinpoint it, it was that van moment that “catapulted my villain arc to the mainstream media.”
But other controversies helped. In 2018, TMZ ran a video of him dropping the N-word during a freestyle rap. In May 2020, he was investigated for filming a looting in a shopping mall in Scottsdale, Arizona, amid the George Floyd riots. Six months later, he threw a massive house party during lockdowns, calling COVID-19 a “hoax” and claiming “98 percent” of news was “lies.”
With Donald Trump, whom he vigorously supports — and vice versa. “He’s definitely a fan,” says Jake.
Courtesy
(Jake remains a vocal supporter of Donald Trump and fears what could happen if he were to lose the Nov. 5 election. “I think America will fall, the borders will open, tens of millions of illegal criminals and people from other countries will pour in,” he says. “And I think freedom of speech will probably be taken away from us in a secret, tricky way that we can’t track technically.” He and Trump — who promoted 1988’s Tyson-Leon Spinks bout that resulted in a Spinks knockout in 91 seconds — have met four times. “He’s definitely a fan,” Jake says.)
In 2021, just days before his fight with Askren in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, TikToker Justine Paradise accused Jake in a 20-minute YouTube video of sexually assaulting her in 2019. It’s a claim Jake vehemently denies, saying at the time, “Sexual assault accusations aren’t something that I, or anyone, should ever take lightly, but to be crystal clear, this claim made against me is 100 percent false.” Despite Jake threatening to sue Paradise for libel, neither party has taken the other to court. Paradise’s video remains on YouTube, however, and has garnered 1.3 million views.
Had his choices been different, I ask, might there have been some other, multiverse Jake Paul, who, groomed by the Disney star-making system, might now be enjoying a successful acting career — perhaps even starring in Marvel features?
“I don’t think I was that talented of an actor,” he confesses. “I could play ‘the bro.’ I needed probably four to five years more acting experience. But I guess I made the decision to stick with my bread and butter, which was social media. It felt safer. I didn’t understand Hollywood. I mean, I still really don’t.”
In early 2018, Logan was catapulted onto his own villain arc — one that at the time eclipsed anything his little brother was dealing with. It happened on a trip to Japan, when Logan documented a visit to a famed “suicide forest.” When he came upon an actual suicide victim hanging from one of the trees, Logan kept the cameras rolling — and uploaded the footage to his YouTube channel. The worldwide backlash was instant and ferocious — and because of his close ties to his sibling, Jake felt it, too.
“I got lumped into all my brother’s hate,” he explains. “It was like, ‘Fuck the Pauls. Fuck both of those people.’ It was bad. The suicide forest thing basically ruined my career and income. I lost probably $30 million in deals. There was one $15 million deal for retail products that fell apart. They were able to get out of it because of a morality clause.”
Once the money dried up, the entourage began to disappear. “Fake people, obviously,” Jake snipes. Suddenly, making goofy, mayhem-heavy YouTube videos didn’t seem quite so cool anymore, so he stopped producing content. For the first time in his life, Jake was hit with a hard dose of reality — and it didn’t feel so good.
His YouTube antics — like jumping on a news van — got him fired.
Courtesy
“Basically, life hit me in the face, and it was like, ‘Who are you? What have you been doing the past couple of years?’ It led to drinking and drugs and Los Angeles and going to parties and just that whole entire world. I got sucked up into it really quickly,” he says.
“And so there I am: No money, kind of hating myself, the whole world hates me. I’m drinking. I’m depressed and not having a good relationship with either of my parents or Logan. And I was just like, ‘Fuck this shit.’ I just felt wrong in life and by all the cards I had been dealt. It was fucked up. I just tried to do good my whole life and here I am with what felt like nothing.
“I had a plan,” he continues. “I mean, it’s fucking crazy. I was going to put a bunch of gas cans in my Lamborghini and get really drunk and drive off the top of this cliff in Calabasas. It’s called Stunt Road.”
Obviously, he did not go through with it — as he puts it, “I was not going to let them win. I was like, ‘I’m going to fight. This is what every social media hater wants is to wake up and see Jake Paul killed himself.’ ”
Jake Paul
Photographed by Amy Lombard
***
According to Jake, boxing saved his life.
“It’s purpose, routine, health, community — all the things I needed,” he tells me on the short ride from the house to his personal gym, where his elite team of trainers is waiting to begin day one of his eight-week training camp ahead of the big fight. “Since 2020, it’s been boxing’s number one and everything else comes after that. I never really liked YouTube. I was just good at it.”
“Jaded” by Drake — his favorite artist — wafts through the speakers as Brandon, his constantly shirtless social content director, checks in on the latest Instagram post. It features Jake in a prosthetic fat suit, a sizable gut hanging over his shorts. “People seem to think it’s real,” Brandon notes, which tickles Jake, who is hefty, yes, but solid. (He currently weighs 216 pounds and expects to be 220 by fight day. “Tyson will probably be 235,” he notes.)
The gym is just one of about a dozen on the island that bear Jake’s name — all part of his Boxing Bullies initiative to bring boxing to disadvantaged youth. I toured another a day earlier — he donated the money to have long-neglected Puerto Rico gyms renovated and equipped (plus two more stateside in Kips Bay, Manhattan, and Dallas) — and it was filled to capacity with boys and young men strenuously working out in sauna-like conditions.
“It’s the hottest gym in the world,” he later tells me. “It’s brutal. If you could do four rounds in there, it’s like eight rounds in a normal gym. I would work out of there and just die. It’s an old-school mentality of sweat and die and pain.” Jake’s gym, by stark contrast, is the only air-conditioned gym on the island. It also contains the most cutting-edge training equipment available: ice baths, hyperbaric chamber, a red-light-therapy bed.
Jake Paul
Photographed by Amy Lombard
Throughout the gym are signs of Jake’s other capitalist endeavors. Cans of his W body spray line the changing stations. A refrigerator is filled with Celcius, the palpitation-inducing energy drink he promotes (not to be confused with Prime, Logan’s sports beverage company). A staffer wears a Betr T-shirt — Jake’s new media startup whose most recent offering is Talk Tuah, a podcast from “Hawk Tuah” meme queen Haliey Welch. He has more than a quarter billion dollars of equity in private companies and reportedly has made $30 million to $60 million a year since 2021. Quite a comeback.
Buzzing around nearby is his core coaching team — the ones you’ll see in his corner on Nov. 15. It consists of head coach Larry Wade, assistant head coach J’Leon Love and game plan man Theotrice Chambers III, or just “Third” for short.
Third doesn’t look like much. He’s a short guy in his 60s with a potbelly. But anyone in the gym will tell you: He is the deadliest ingredient of all. He hails from Detroit’s legendary Kronk Gym — which produced the likes of Lennox Lewis and Tyson’s ear-mangled former foe Evander Holyfield — and, in his Yoda-like way, he’s upping Jake’s “boxing IQ.”
Tommy Fury came to blows with Jake during their 2023 bout
Francois Nel/Getty Images
Wade, who has coached 14 world champions, agreed to take on Jake because of two things: “[Jake] said, ‘I will work hard. Never back off me,’ ” Wade says. “And he said, ‘Never lie to me. If I’m ready, tell me I’m ready. If I’m not, tell me I’m not.’ That was the seal for me.”
Third was a harder sell. “I didn’t know what YouTube even was,” he recalls. “I’m not a computer person. I’m out in the world, doing things with my hands to make money.” Then he watched some of Jake’s fights. He saw the Robinson knockout. He watched the eight grueling rounds of the Fury match. “I said, ‘Kid got some heart,’ ” he says.
After a warm-up session to a blaring soundtrack courtesy of Gunna and 2 Chainz, Jake dons headgear and spars with DaCarree “Mac Truck” Scott — a beast of a heavyweight in a Purple Rain T-shirt, chosen for his Tyson-like size and nuclear fists. They spar for two-minute rounds — eight shorter rounds were Tyson’s request, versus the typical three — before Jake moves on to the speed bags and finally the treadmill. He is fierce and focused throughout.
The strategy for beating Tyson, Jake explains to me over breakfast, is “to just box on the outside and then use my footwork to be more agile and get him chasing me — and then attack him when he’s out of position. That should frustrate him.” His opponent, he suspects after studying hours of Tyson fight tape, will try “to trap me on the ropes and then get blows off to angles on each side.”
Jutta Leerdam a top Dutch speed skater
Douwe Bijlsma/BSR Agency/Getty Images
“The progression Jake has made is not normal,” says girlfriend Leerdam, who as a silver-medaling Olympic speed skater knows a thing or two about elite training. (The pair met when Jake slid into her Instagram DMs in 2023 and invited her onto his podcast.) “Other athletes, they make a few percentage points of progression a year, if at all. Jake makes so much in a year,” she continues. “So I do trust his skills. I’m very proud of him. But of course, Mike Tyson could give one punch that is harder than Mike has ever thrown — and it will be lights out for Jake.”
As the media-shy moneyman pulling levers behind the scenes, Bidarian was introduced to Jake just six months after the then-CFO helped mastermind what probably will be the biggest deal of his career: the $4 billion sale of UFC in 2016 to a group led by Ari Emanuel’s WME-IMG (now Endeavor Group Holdings), at the time the most expensive transaction for an organization in sports history.
It would cede that title in 2023, when WWE sold to Endeavor for $9 billion — and the two fighting leagues combined into one live-sports megalith known as TKO.
While looking around for his next challenge, Bidarian got a call about Jake and, not understanding exactly what a “YouTuber” was, agreed to meet him. Almost immediately, cash register sounds went off in his head. Or, as Bidarian puts it, “I saw a unique opportunity to create a direct-to-consumer relationship within fight sports.”
Bidarian ended up executive producing the Tyson vs. Jones fight, brokering a $1 million fee for Jake — six times less than Jake had made for his previous fight. “I said, ‘Listen, this is what makes sense for this event, but I promise you, if you perform well, your next payday will be at least eight figures.’ We turned that into an over $10 million guarantee for his next fight,” Bidarian recalls.
Jake Paul
Photographed by Amy Lombard
They joined forces officially in 2021 and founded MVP. For Bidarian, Jake represents a golden moment to make boxing a dominant sport once again. “Jake’s and my focus has been generating interest in Gen Z and Gen Alpha in the sport of boxing,” he says. “And if you look at all the statistics, boxing is one of the fastest growing sports for Gen Alpha, by far. Jake’s had a large part to play in that. If you ask a lot of kids — age 6 to 16 — who’s the best boxer in the world, their answer is Jake Paul.”
Seeing an opportunity to do some good for the sport, the two men also drew up a list of priorities. “One was giving young athletes an opportunity and the other was to bring women’s boxing to the forefront,” Bidarian says. That year, they signed Amanda Serrano, current featherweight world champion and a folk hero in her native Puerto Rico.
In 2022, Serrano headlined the first-ever female boxing match to take top billing at Madison Square Garden against lightweight world champion Katie Taylor. She lost — but in many ways the fight was the biggest triumph of her 12-year career. “Before that fight, I was making practically nothing,” Serrano says. “Like $4,000 bucks a fight. But Jake got me $1 million for that fight. I didn’t believe it until I got the wire into my account.”
She’ll have another shot at defeating Taylor on Nov. 15, when the two will spar once again as the official undercard to Paul vs. Tyson — what undoubtedly will be the most watched women’s boxing match in history.
“We’re making history together,” Serrano says. “We both deserve this opportunity. We worked extremely hard. Jake saw the lack of respect, the lack of recognition for female boxing. He wanted people to recognize us and acknowledge that we’re here.”
But the Nov. 15 crowds likely won’t be cheering for Jake. They’ll be chanting, “Fuck Jake Paul!” And for now, at least, that’s OK.
“It will probably always be that way,” he says. “So we just embrace the villain role. I can detach from the guy I play in these press conferences from who I am personally, and it just makes all the content better.
“The line of hate is very close to love,” he adds. “And jealousy is just love plus hate. I think that’s where all the hate for me originally came from, like, ‘Look at this young guy who’s living his life, mansion, cars, girls.’ I’m 21 and insecure and I see a 21-year-old living this crazy life? I’m going to be like, ‘Fuck this guy,’ too.”
Jake, with his 6-year-old golden retriever, Thor, leans into his image as the villain but says he has a softer side committed to giving back. As part of his Boxing Bullies initiative, he donated the money to have long-neglected Puerto Rico gyms renovated.
Photographed by Amy Lombard
This story appeared in the Oct. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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