Is Floyd Mayweather Really Going Broke? An Investigation.

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A question for you: Have you ever carried $1 million in a duffle bag? In all likelihood you have not! OK, how about this: Have you ever dumped $50,000 into a swimming pool just to watch a bunch of partygoers at your house jump in after it? Probably not.

Here’s one more: Have you ever gone a year (or more) without wearing the same pair of underwear twice? While this is a very intimate and personal life decision, we’re going to guess the answer to this is “no” as well.

So these are a few things that set you apart from Floyd Mayweather. In addition to being one of the greatest boxers ever, Mayweather is also one of the highest paid athletes of all time, known for an absurdly lavish lifestyle.

And yet! There’s a good chance you have a better credit score than Mayweather right now. “Money” Mayweather has been in the news lately for a host of non-pugilistic reasons: for being the subject of numerous lawsuits claiming he’s defaulted on debts, for having a lien taken against him by the IRS for the payment of back taxes, and, most seriously, for facing felony fraud charges related to the purchase of a $200,000 watch that could result in Mayweather being sent to prison for more than 20 years.

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Mayweather’s been making moves in the past year. Last year he announced exhibition fights with Mike Tyson and Manny Pacquiao, both of which have the name recognition to drive serious interest. But both have been postponed (Tyson’s due to an injury to Iron Mike; Pacquiao’s due to ongoing contract issues on Mayweather’s side), and speculation on Mayweather’s financial health has surged on the Internet.

Which raises the question: Is Floyd Mayweather Really Going Broke? An investigation follows…

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There’s no way. He’s made too much money to ever go broke.
Imagine a million dollars. For efficiency’s sake, let’s imagine it in one-hundred dollar bills. That’s 10,000 one-hundred dollar bills! Let’s put it in an imaginary duffle bag. Now imagine 100 duffle bags with 10,000 one-hundred dollar bills stuffed inside them. That’s 100 million dollars, which is, according to some accountings, not even one-tenth of the money Floyd Mayweather has earned in his career. This is all a convoluted way of saying that Mayweather has made an estimated $1.1 billion dollars in his career, including $280 million for his 2017 bout with Conor McGregor and $250 million for his 2015 fight with Manny Pacquiao. It’s really hard to spend 1100 bags full of $100 bills.

And yet: Don’t forget to pay the IRS.
Like everyone from Al Capone to Willie Nelson, Mayweather has seen his share of troubles with the IRS. According to some reports, Mayweather owed $22 million on his tax bill for the year 2015 alone. This past March, the IRS filed a federal tax lien on $7.3 million in unpaid taxes from 2018-2023, giving the feds a legal claim on Mayweather’s property before other creditors and limiting Floyd’s ability to move his assets.

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But he’s still pulling in millions in purses for exhibition fights.
Mayweather officially retired in 2018 after winning his fight with UFC star Conor McGregor to push his career record to 50-0. Since then he’s fought in a number of exhibition matches against kickboxers, reality TV stars, and YouTubers, bringing in an estimated $80 million since he hung up the gloves.

And yet: He’s spending $3 million a month.
Recently, investigative creator Spencer Cornelia estimated that Mayweather is spending $3 million a month. Over the years, Mayweather’s “day-to-day” expenses have become legendary: a full-time barber on a monthly $12,000 retainer; a private chef who gets paid $1000 per meal; $6500 a year on underwear so he never has to wear the same pair twice. Mayweather may have made $80 million since 2018, but if he’s actually spending $3 million a month, he’s $208 million in the red over that time span.

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But the assets he owns are still worth something, right?
Yes, an $18 million dollar Jacob and Co. watch is not worthless simply because it’s no longer in its shrinkwrap. Similarly, a $4.8 million Koenigsegg CCXR Trevita doesn’t depreciate completely just because it rolls off the lot. But none of these items are worth close to what Mayweather originally paid for them. For one, the market for them is very small—if you have one of just two that exists in the world, as is the case with the Trevita, there’s ostensibly only one other person in the world who wants it at that price. And two, Mayweather is famous for customizing his purchases; he has many of his watches customized in ways that void the warranty before they leave the store. So yes, they’re still worth something, they’re just worth the most only to Floyd.

And yet: He’s still buying ridiculously expensive watches—but he might be writing bad checks to get them.
If you’ve bought an $18 million watch then buying a $200,000 watch seems like a conspicuous display of frugality. Just not if you don’t have $200,000 to spend on a watch. On Christmas Day, 2024, Mayweather is alleged to have purchased a $200,000 Audemars Piguet watch from a Las Vegas luxury resale boutique, using a check from an account he is alleged to have known did not have sufficient funds for the transaction. This past June, Mayweather was charged with theft and fraud after the jeweler took him to court, claiming he’d asked Mayweather for payment numerous times but was ignored. The fraud charge carries a potential four-year sentence and the felony theft charge has Mayweather facing a potential 20-year bid.

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But he’s going to make a lot of money from suing people, right?
In February, Mayweather filed suit against Showtime, claiming the former television partner for many of his fights owes him “at least” $340 million. Mayweather signed a 30-month, six-fight deal with Showtime in 2013. At the time it was the biggest deal ever for an individual athlete. In the lawsuit filed this year, Mayweather claims that Showtime engaged in an elaborate conspiracy with his former manager Al Haymon to conceal hundreds of millions of Mayweather’s earnings at the height of his fame. Interestingly though, Haymon isn’t named as a defendant in the suit. In May, Mayweather filed another lawsuit, this one for $175 million, claiming that a different manager, Jone Rechnitz, conspired with a Florida real estate investor named Ayal Frist (remember that name) to steal from Floyd in another elaborate scheme.

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Except other folks are suing Floyd and they’re preventing him from staging exhibition fights.
This is where the saga gets migraine-inducing complicated. In June, CSI Sports Events sued Mayweather, alleging he’d made a deal with them last summer to stage an exhibition fight with Mike Tyson scheduled for spring of this year, and a professional bout against Manny Pacquiao sometime later this year. CSI claims that Mayweather then signed a different deal for a Pacquiao fight last December, but that CSI was willing to go through with that fight provided they received full billing rights and were repaid the original advance they’d paid Mayweather. CSI then learned Mayweather had scheduled yet another exhibition bout, in violation of his original deal with CSI. This bout was with world champion kickboxer Mike Zambidis, scheduled for the end of June in Greece. The Tyson exhibition match was scheduled for May 30, but had to be postponed when Tyson broke his hand. Then in June, Mayweather sought to terminate his contract with CSI, triggering CSI’s lawsuit and a successful injunction to stop the Zambidis fight.

Still with us? CSI is suing Mayweather for $6.65 million, a relatively paltry sum compared to some of the other numbers that have swirled around Floyd over the years. The problem for Mayweather is that his co-defendant in the suit is Frist Apex Ventures, the real estate company owned by Ayal Frist, one of the defendants in the suit Mayweather himself filed in May. It’s never a good thing when a person you’re suing is also your co-defendant in an entirely different lawsuit—especially when that person’s been negotiating multi-million dollar deals for you.

And he’s taking out mortgages on his houses, selling some of his assets, and borrowing huge amounts of money.
In 2021 Mayweather bragged about owning his homes and other assets outright, but, according to Business Insider, Mayweather took out mortgages on his homes last year. He’s also the subject of numerous smaller lawsuits alleging he’s in arrears for payments on everything from this G-Wagon to trash pick-up at one of his Las Vegas homes. Two of his Las Vegas business properties have been foreclosed on, and in December, he sold Air Mayweather, the Gulfstream jet that was the scene for many of his most famous social media posts, as well as homes in Miami and Beverly Hills. He’s also taken out a $54 million loan from a lender in LA, at a reported 9% interest rate. There are check-cashing spots that don’t charge that much interest.

The verdict?
Floyd isn’t van-down-by-the-river broke. He’s not even paying-off-student-loans broke. But he’s got a lot of legal trouble and no good ways to make new money (he hasn’t been able to put on an exhibition match this year). It’s not looking good, but he does have friends in high places—paging Dana White!

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