Drake Biography 2026: From Degrassi to a $400M Empire

Last updated: October 2, 2026 · By Nathan Cole

Drake is 39 years old in 2026. Born Aubrey Drake Graham on October 24, 1986, in Toronto, the former child actor turned rap superstar is worth an estimated $400 million — a fortune Celebrity Net Worth tracks from about $1 million in 2009, to about $100 million by 2018, to about $250 million when his Universal deal landed in 2022, to $400 million now.

The arc between those numbers runs through a wheelchair on a Canadian teen drama, three self-released mixtapes, a bidding war that ended at Young Money in June 2009, a fatherhood reveal forced by a diss track, the biggest rap feud of the decade, and a defamation lawsuit that a federal judge threw out in October 2025. He turned personal notebooks into a catalogue that has not left the charts for most of two decades.

In May 2026 he did something no major artist had ever done: released three albums — ICEMAN, HABIBTI, and MAID OF HONOUR — on a single day, swept the top three spots on the Billboard 200, and broke Michael Jackson’s record for the most U.S. number-one singles by a male artist. He turns 40 on October 24, with a federal appeal hearing set for December 4. This is the full biography: the family, the TV years, the music, the money, and the year that changed the story again.

Early Life: Born October 24, 1986, in Toronto

Aubrey Drake Graham was born on October 24, 1986, in Toronto, Ontario, the son of Dennis Graham, an African-American musician from Memphis who played drums for Jerry Lee Lewis, and Sandi (Sher) Graham, a Canadian educator of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. His parents divorced when he was five, and he was raised by his mother in Toronto’s Forest Hill neighborhood — a wealthy part of the city, a fact that later made his “started from the bottom” lyrics a long-running argument in Canadian media.

He attended Forest Hill Public School and then Forest Hill Collegiate Institute, where he began acting, though he did not graduate. Summers were spent with his father in Memphis, Tennessee — a second home that surfaces in his music as often as Toronto does. He is the nephew of musicians Larry Graham and Teenie Hodges.

Two things shaped the early years that biography sources keep returning to. His mother is Jewish — of Latvian and Russian Jewish descent, per IMDb — and he was raised in her faith; Judaism shows up in his lyrics and public life to this day. And before Degrassi, he was already working: as a young boy he appeared in commercials for Sears and GMC, the kind of unglamorous child-actor grind that paid for studio time later.

He has described the family’s money situation plainly. “My mother was very sick. We were very poor, like broke,” he told Complex, in a quote Parade republished in its 2026 profile. “The only money I had coming in was off of Canadian TV, which isn’t that much money when you break it down.”

The Degrassi Years: “Wheelchair Jimmy” (2001–2008)

In 2001, at fourteen, Aubrey Graham landed the role that made him famous in Canada: Jimmy Brooks on CTV’s teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation. He played the character for seven-plus seasons through 2008 — first as a high school basketball star, then, from season four, as a wheelchair user after being shot by a classmate in a school-shooting storyline.

The wheelchair nearly cost him the job. As the show’s 20th anniversary oral history revealed, writer James Hurst received a letter from a Toronto law firm stating that “Aubrey Graham will not return to Degrassi season six as Jimmy Brooks unless his injury is healed, and he’s out of the wheelchair.” When Hurst confronted the teenage actor, the reason came out plainly: “All my friends in the rap game say I’m soft because I’m in a wheelchair.” Hurst’s answer ended the argument — “tell your friends in the rap game that you got shot. How much harder can you get?” — and Graham backed down.

By then he was living two careers at once. Show creator Linda Schuyler recalled that he worked on set during the day and recorded at night: “At about two or three in the morning, he had made a deal with our security guards after he got reprimanded. After he’d been working most of the night, he would then come and sleep in his dressing room, so that when he was needed to be called for his 8:00 call or whatnot, they just knocked on his door and got him up.”

Toronto never forgot the role. In 2014, locals started sticking Drake’s face onto wheelchair-accessibility signs around the city — vandalism, technically, which Drake himself called “great.”

The Mixtape Grind: 6,000 Copies to a Bidding War (2006–2009)

Drake launched his music career while still on Degrassi, self-releasing three mixtapes in four years. Each one did a different job — and together they triggered one of the decade’s loudest label bidding wars.

The third tape made the decision for him. “Best I Ever Had” debuted at #92 on the Hot 100 and climbed to #2, and the RIAA eventually certified it double platinum. Labels lined up to sign the actor from Degrassi who was suddenly moving rap records. In June 2009 he signed with Lil Wayne’s Young Money Entertainment, and an official EP version of So Far Gone went on to ship 500,000 units — Gold status.

Young Money and Thank Me Later (2010)

Drake’s debut studio album, Thank Me Later, arrived on June 15, 2010, and went straight to number one on the Billboard 200, eventually going platinum on the strength of singles “Over” and “Find Your Love”. The album’s success proved the gamble: the TV kid could carry a rap album to the top of the American charts in his first week out.

The sound was already the formula that would define the next decade — rapping and singing in the same verse, R&B melodies over hip-hop production. Critics called it a hybrid; within a few years, the entire industry was doing it. The Fandom wikis that dominate the “drake biography” SERP today credit him with popularizing R&B sensibilities in hip-hop, and on this point, for once, they’re right.

Take Care and the Global Takeover (2011–2013)

Take Care, released on November 15, 2011, topped the charts in both the U.S. and Canada and produced “Headlines”, the title track with Rihanna, “Make Me Proud”, and “The Motto” — the last of which popularized the acronym YOLO into everyday speech. At the 2013 Grammys it won Best Rap Album, Drake’s first Grammy.

He was building infrastructure alongside the music. In 2012, with producer Noah “40” Shebib and manager Oliver El-Khatib, he founded the OVO Sound record label — the imprint that would become both his business vehicle and his brand. A year later came Nothing Was The Same (September 24, 2013), and on September 30, 2013, the Toronto Raptors named him their global ambassador; in March 2019 the team’s practice facility was renamed the OVO Athletic Centre.

The collaborations were stacking up too. He and Rihanna landed two U.S. number-ones together — “What’s My Name?” in 2010 and “Work” in 2016 — and his 2011 turn on Nicki Minaj’s “Moment 4 Life” earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Performance.

Views and Streaming Dominance (2016–2017)

Views (2016) spent 13 weeks atop the Billboard 200, and its lead single “One Dance” became his first number-one on the Billboard Hot 100 as a lead artist. The Summer Sixteen Tour — 54 shows alongside Future — grossed $84.3 million, the highest-grossing hip-hop tour of all time at that point.

The chart consistency was the real story. Until August 2017, Drake had at least one song on the Hot 100 — as lead or featured artist — for 430 consecutive weeks, more than eight straight years. In March 2017 he released More Life, which he insisted was a “playlist” rather than an album; “Fake Love” and “Passionfruit” both went top ten worldwide anyway.

Scorpion and Fatherhood: The Story of Adonis (2018–2023)

In May 2018, Pusha T’s diss track “Story of Adidon” revealed that Drake had a secret son. A month later, Drake confirmed it himself on his album Scorpion, in the tracks “Emotionless” and “March 14”. His son is Adonis Graham, born October 11, 2017, to Drake and French artist Sophie Brussaux.

Fatherhood moved to the center of his public life. Adonis appeared on the cover art of For All the Dogs (2023), went on the road with Drake during the It’s All A Blur Tour, and released his own debut song, “My Man Freestyle”, with a cameo from his father in the video. In October 2025 the two celebrated Adonis’s 8th birthday with a western-themed party; he turns nine on October 11, 2026 — nine days from now.

The family thread runs alongside the music through the early 2020s: the 2025 collaborative album Some Sexy Songs 4 U with PartyNextDoor kept his release streak alive, while Adonis became the fixture of his Instagram that the son’s mother — now known as contemporary artist Rosee Divine — never was.

The Business Empire: OVO, NOCTA, Stake, and Air Drake

Drake never made the Jay-Z leap into selling companies — his fortune is music money, compounding. But the empire around the music is wide, and several of its pieces carry nine-figure figures in music-press reporting.

The pattern is the pattern of his whole career: he rents nothing he can own. The label, the clothing line, the plane, the house in the neighborhood he grew up in — each one turns an expense of touring life into an asset on the balance sheet. That instinct is a large part of why $400 million is the number and not $250 million.

The Kendrick Lamar Feud (2024–2025)

The biggest rap feud of the decade belongs in any 2026 biography, because its fallout is still moving. In 2024 Drake and Kendrick Lamar traded diss tracks, and Lamar’s “Not Like Us” won the exchange decisively — the song took multiple Grammys and then headlined the Super Bowl LIX halftime show in February 2025, a victory lap Drake could not block.

Drake’s response was twofold: music and court. The music came in 2026, with the triple album (below). The court case ran on its own track — and ended, at first, in defeat.

The UMG Lawsuit — and the December 4, 2026 Appeal

In January 2025, Drake filed a federal defamation lawsuit — not against Kendrick Lamar, but against Universal Music Group. The complaint accused the label of knowingly publishing and aggressively promoting “Not Like Us”, with its accusations about Drake and minors, and of targeting the label’s distribution, marketing, and performance-related exposure rather than the artist who made the record. Notably, Lamar was never named as a defendant.

On October 9, 2025, U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas granted UMG’s motion to dismiss, ruling that the challenged lyrics were “nonactionable opinion” and that a reasonable listener would not understand them as objective, verifiable facts. Drake’s team appealed — filing a 117-page opening brief in January 2026 — and on September 18, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit scheduled oral arguments for December 4, 2026 (docket No. 25-2758), before a three-judge panel.

The December hearing will not decide whether the song’s accusations are true. The judges will decide whether Drake’s complaint stated legally sufficient claims that should have survived dismissal — affirming, reviving, or remanding the case. A ruling is expected sometime after the hearing; the court has announced no date.

2026: Three Albums in One Day

On May 15, 2026, Drake released not one album but three — his 9th, 10th, and 11th studio albums, all at once. ICEMAN is the straight-rap centerpiece; HABIBTI is the R&B record (the title is Arabic for “my love”); MAID OF HONOUR is the melodic, feature-heavy international set. Together: 43 songs, nearly two and a half hours of music, his first solo albums since For All the Dogs (2023). All three arrived via OVO Sound under exclusive license to Republic Records — a division of UMG, the company he was suing at the time.

The rollout was its own production. It began on July 4, 2025, with Iceman Episode 1 — a 58-minute livestream of Drake driving an Iceman-branded truck through Toronto to an ice warehouse, debuting “What Did I Miss?”. Episode 2 moved to Manchester, where a Pinocchio figure chased him through the city — read by fans as a reference to the lies he felt surrounded him after the feud — and introduced the Central Cee collaboration “Which One”. Episode 3 aired from Milan in September, previewing “Dog House” with Yeat and Julia Wolf. In late April 2026, a 25-foot ice sculpture appeared in a downtown Toronto parking lot; fans attacked it with blowtorches and pickaxes until streamer Kishka found a hidden booklet revealing the May 15 date — and Drake reportedly rewarded him with $50,000.

The records fell immediately. ICEMAN opened with 463,000 album-equivalent units in its first U.S. week and topped the Billboard 200, giving Drake the most U.S. number-one albums by a male artist and tying Taylor Swift for the most by any solo artist (15). “Janice STFU” debuted at number one on the Hot 100 — his 14th U.S. chart-topper, breaking Michael Jackson’s record for the most number-ones by a male artist since the chart began in 1958. With HABIBTI and MAID OF HONOUR debuting at #2 and #3, Drake became the first artist ever to hold the top three spots on the Billboard 200 concurrently. The albums also hit #1 in Canada, the U.K., Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and the Netherlands.

The lyrics did not dodge the feud or the lawsuit. On “Make Them Pay” he raps, “I’m better off independent, they should let him leave, yeah / ‘Cause I just wanna be free.” On “Janice STFU”: “Swear my label gotta free me, baby.” On “Dust”, aimed at Lamar: “What was the year you said you had slaps, cause I don’t remember it going like that” — and the line about Lamar’s audience listening “cuz they feelin’ some guilt.”

The 0M Fortune: How It Adds Up

Guide Net Worth’s September 30, 2026 estimate put Drake at $400 million. Celebrity Net Worth lands in the same place, and Parade’s 2026 profile confirms $400 million. The number has a track record — the same outlet’s timeline runs about $1 million in 2009, about $100 million by 2018, about $250 million when the Universal deal landed in 2022, and about $400 million in 2026.

Two caveats keep the number honest. First, Drake has never disclosed his finances; the Universal deal’s upfront-vs-over-time split is private, and the Stake arrangement’s exact terms are reported, not confirmed. Second, Forbes publishes pay, not wealth — the $78 million it estimated for 2025 is income, not the $400 million fortune. Below the billionaires (Jay-Z, Dr. Dre) but ahead of most of his peers, Drake’s wealth is structural: a catalogue that streams forever, contracts that pay every year, and property that holds.

Personal Life: Faith, Family, and Privacy

Drake has never married. His relationships are the one part of his biography he keeps locked down — the public knows the songwriting, not the story. What is confirmed: his son Adonis Graham, born October 11, 2017, to Drake and French artist Sophie Brussaux (now known as contemporary artist Rosee Divine), and a co-parenting relationship the two have kept steady and low-profile for years. During the UMG lawsuit, his team said he had pulled Adonis from school for safety reasons; he has since announced he will appeal the dismissal.

Faith is public. Raised in his mother’s Jewish faith, Drake has referenced his Jewishness throughout his career — bar-mitzvah references, Passover nods, and pride in an identity that made him one of rap’s few Jewish superstars. His Wikipedia profile also lists dual Canada–U.S. citizenship, a detail that rarely makes the Fandom biographies.

Awards and Records

Biography pages love to list awards without dates. Here’s the count as 2026 coverage tallies it:

What’s Next: The Rest of 2026

Three dates circle the rest of Drake’s 2026. On October 11, Adonis turns nine. On October 24, Drake turns forty. And on December 4, his lawyers face UMG’s before a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit — the hearing that decides whether the “Not Like Us” case comes back to life or stays buried.

No tour has been announced for the back half of 2026, which, given the triple album, reads less like a gap and more like a pause before the announcement. Whether 2027 brings the ICEMAN tour or something entirely different, the biography’s current chapter is already written: the biggest commercial comeback swing of the streaming era, taken while under federal litigation, in the same month he became the first artist in history to hold the Billboard 200’s entire top three.

Sources & Reporting

Figures in this profile reflect reporting through September 2026. Key sources: Wikipedia (biographical spine — birth, Degrassi, mixtapes, the ICEMAN page’s chart records, updated three days before this profile); Parade’s 2026 profile (the $400 million estimate, the Degrassi/Schuyler dressing-room detail, the “very poor, like broke” Complex quote); Celebrity Net Worth (the fortune trajectory, via usacelebs.com’s 2026 recap); Forbes (2025 highest-paid musicians, $78 million); IMDb’s mini-biography (birth data, Sears/GMC commercials, height, Jewish heritage); the A.V. Club via Stereogum, NME, and Exclaim! (the Degrassi oral history — the law-firm letter, the wheelchair fight); iHeart/B95 and Hot 97 (Adonis’s birthday timeline and the school-pull detail); Music Business Worldwide via BallerAlert, IndieCut (September 23, 2026), The Source, Law Commentary, and HotNewHipHop (the UMG lawsuit timeline and the December 4 appeal date); BallerAlert, hit-channel, and blkcosmo (the May 15, 2026 triple-album release, rollout, and chart records). Where outlets disagree, the article explains why and publishes a range rather than picking a side.

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