Dr. Dre and the Lucrative Business of Not Rapping

Dr. Dre has tripled his net worth in the past few days. Last week news emerged that HTC was buying a 51 percent stake in the headphone company Dre co-owns with Interscope chief Jimmy Iovine for a startling $300 million, a deal that could eventually push the rapper's wealth north of half a billion according to Forbes' back-of-the-envelope calculations. Dr. Dre has been in the headphone business for less than four years, a little less than half the amount of time he's been working on his final album, Detox, due out next year. But Dr. Dre's not the only hip-hop artist inverting roles. The past few years have seen some of the industries biggest entertainers become wildly wealthy off of everything except actually entertaining people.

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire.