BTXChester

Tyler Perry is worth $1.4 billion and he fired his own aunt for not showing up to work. When his mom died, he mailed the rest of the family letters. 60 days to get a job, or the money stops. Now here's the thing. Back in the early '90s, that same guy was sleeping in his car. He's 6'5" and the car was a Geo Metro, so picture that for a minute. In 1992 he took every dollar he had, about $12,000 from selling used cars plus a tax refund, and put on his first play in Atlanta. He figured 1,200 people would show up that weekend. Thirty did. His rent and his car payment were riding on that show, so when it flopped, he lost the apartment too. And he kept going. He put the play up again the next year, and the year after that, and lost money every single time until the seventh try finally sold out in 1998. Seven years later Diary of a Mad Black Woman opened at #1 and made $22 million its first weekend. He kept ownership of what he made, and eventually turned 330 acres of an old Army base in Atlanta into his own studio. Forbes has him at $1.4 billion now. His mom, Maxine, was the reason he kept pushing through all of it. He's said as much. She asked him to look after the family, so he did, for years, the whole time she was alive. She passed in December 2009, and that's when the letters went out. If you've lived what he lived, you know which part actually made you. It was six years of failing with nobody coming to save him. A monthly check from a rich relative takes exactly that away from somebody. So with his aunt, he tried a job first. She'd call asking for money, he'd send it, and finally he offered her a spot so she could build something with him. She kept calling in and not showing up, so she was out. According to Perry, every relative who got that letter found a job. Some of those jobs didn't pay much, and he said he didn't care, he wanted them proud of a paycheck they earned themselves. He told Derrick Hayes, the guy who started Big Dave's Cheesesteaks, to watch out for family "putting holes in the boat" while you're trying to get across. Sometimes, he said, you build the boat by yourself and have everybody wait on the shore. He runs the same rules with his son Aman, who does chores to get paid. Honestly, he gave them the best thing he had. Sixty days and nobody coming to save them, which is the exact deal he got in 1992, and it's the deal that made him a billionaire.