In mid-May 2026, Drake released three albums on a single night and landed all three in the top three of the Billboard 200, something no artist had done before. A week later, Floyd Mayweather walked into a different kind of spotlight and filed a lawsuit that accused a former associate of stealing $175 million from him.
The two have been friends for years. And the way Drake handles the noise around his career goes back to advice he has long credited to Mayweather.
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The advice a boxer gave a rapper
It goes back to 2012. In an interview with MTV’s Sway Calloway, Drake was asked how he dealt with criticism. Most of his came from social media rather than booing crowds, and he said as much. Then he pointed to Mayweather.
Floyd had given him a way to think about it, Drake explained. Cheers one night, boos the next, it all landed the same way, as proof people were still paying attention. “It’s all just noise that lets me know that I’m relevant,” he said.
Mayweather had lived that idea for real. Fans booed his cautious, defensive style for years and called his fights dull. He kept winning and kept getting paid, and he walked away at 50 and 0. In 2006 he paid $750,000 to buy his way out of his promotional contract and run his own business, which let him keep the money other fighters hand over to promoters. Over his career he earned more than $1.2 billion, a first for any boxer.
How Drake and Floyd Mayweather know each other
Drake and Mayweather have been friends for the better part of a decade. They have shown up for each other at parties, fights, and family events going back to at least 2016.
- May 2016: Mayweather hired Drake and Future to perform at the Sweet 16 party for his daughter Iyanna, where Drake ran through “One Dance,” “Energy,” and “Back to Back,” according to Vibe and The Washington Post.
- July 2017: Drake opened the Toronto stop of the Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor press tour at the Budweiser Stage, in front of a crowd of 16,000 who had mostly come to cheer McGregor, as CBC News, Billboard, and Sky Sports reported.
- August 2017: Drake was among the celebrities ringside in Las Vegas on August 26, when Mayweather stopped McGregor in the 10th round to close his career at 50 and 0, per a TMZ Sports attendance list reported by Bleacher Report.
- February 2018: Drake turned up at Mayweather’s 41st birthday at a Los Angeles roller rink and skated along to one of his own tracks while Floyd ran tricks in custom skates, according to Complex.
The Sweet 16 booking stands out the most, since that kind of invitation usually goes to real friends rather than famous acquaintances.
Two careers built on the same idea
Drake took that idea and built a business around it.
He co-founded the label OVO Sound, held on to ownership, and signed a Universal Music Group deal in 2022 that was reported at $400 million or more. The criticism never let up. He was called too pop and too commercial. He kept setting records anyway. He became the first artist to pass 500 million certified units from the RIAA, and his “It’s All a Blur” run became the highest-grossing rap tour on record. His net worth sits around $400 million.
Both men operated the same way. Each decided for himself what success looked like, then ignored anyone who kept score differently. Mayweather had his paydays and his unbeaten record. Drake had his sales and his long string of chart-toppers. Winning over the crowd was never really the goal.
Where they each stand in 2026
For years the two of them were doing the same thing from different industries. This year has pulled them in opposite directions.
Drake’s three albums, ICEMAN, Habibti, and Maid of Honour, arrived on May 15. ICEMAN entered at number one with 463,000 units in its first week. The single “Janice STFU” debuted on top of the Hot 100, which Billboard reported broke a Michael Jackson chart record that had stood for decades. Two years after Kendrick Lamar got the better of him in their public feud, Drake answered with a chart run no one in music had managed before.
Mayweather’s year has gone the other way. His $175 million lawsuit accuses former associate Jona Rechnitz of moving his money through companies Mayweather did not control. It claims about $100 million of his jewelry was handed to Miami dealers for roughly $13 million in cash, and that his private jet was sold after he signed transfer papers with the buyer’s name left blank. He has said he still does not know who owns the plane. A separate suit he filed in February 2026 seeks at least $340 million from Showtime over fight earnings he says went missing, which the network has denied. Around the same time, a court ordered him to pay close to $1 million in back child support.
Even his return to the ring has been messy. A rematch with Manny Pacquiao, eleven years after their 2015 bout, has been planned for late September 2026, though the date, the venue, and even whether it counts as a sanctioned fight have all been argued over in public, and Mayweather has been named in a separate suit tied to the negotiations.
The Rechnitz case is the one that bites hardest. About a year before he filed it, Mayweather sat beside Rechnitz at a New York real estate forum and told the room he trusted him completely, criminal record and all, and that the two would keep doing business together.
The same lesson, used two ways
The advice that carried Drake was about ignoring noise. What hurt Mayweather was something else.
A booing crowd is noise, and noise can be tuned out. A trusted associate quietly moving your fortune is a warning, and a warning is worth hearing. Mayweather built a career on shutting out the first kind of sound. By his own account in the lawsuit, he never caught the second until the money was gone. The instinct that made him almost impossible to hit in the ring never reached the people he let near his bank accounts.
Drake aimed the same lesson at safer targets. He used it on critics and rivals while keeping a tight hold on his own business, and he came out of the worst public stretch of his career with the biggest numbers of his life.
The man who taught Drake to ignore the noise is now surrounded by the loudest noise of his own career, and most of it is coming from people he once called friends.
