PATRICK MCBRIDE / SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

BY  MICKEY RAPKIN 

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CLAY PATRICK MCBRIDE / SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

ON A HOT EARLY-SUMMER AFTERNOON, Jake Paul sits in his backyard, telling me about the time God spoke to him.

We’re poolside at his $16 million house on the north side of Puerto Rico, where he lives and trains. And while I’m aware that a chat with God is exactly the kind of story a YouTube-provocateur-turned-pro-boxer might invent for clicks, this is not a bit.

On his podcast, BS w/ Jake Paul, the 27-year-old comes off as a brash shit-talker (and he is, recently claiming that Conor McGregor tweets at 3:00 a.m. on coke). But Paul is more thoughtful IRL, nervous almost, clutching his left forearm as he speaks. His features are softer, too; he looks like the villain in The Karate Kid if you drew him from memory.

"I’m going to explain something that can’t be explained with words,” he tells me, slowly and deliberately. “And that’s really how I describe it to people.” He was under the influence of the psychedelic DMT a few years ago. “It’s like you go into this space where you fully understand human consciousness and the universe and how everything is interconnected, and that the whole universe is just one being.” As he tells it, both times he tried DMT, God laid out the same mission for him. It’s a big one. We’ll get to God’s plan soon. But I had to wonder if our Lord also had a few questions for Paul first.

Paul’s reputation precedes him. As high school kids in Westlake, Ohio, he and his older brother, Logan, made their names on the short-form-video site Vine, where their Jackass-style bro comedy attracted millions of followers (and brands chasing that clout) in 2013. Their fame outlived the app, so they migrated to YouTube. In 2016, Disney hired Paul to play (what else?) a YouTuber on a show called Bizaardvark. Midway through season 2, they split: Paul’s brand of hijinks (setting fire to furniture in an empty pool) was off-brand for the Mouse.

 Jake Paul, 27, and Mike Tyson, 58, face off. Their fight on Netflix is scheduled for November 15.
COOPER NEILL / GETTY IMAGES FOR NETFLIX

An army of disaffected youth 15 million strong reared on Internet memes have since followed him everywhere. They called themselves Jake Paulers. If he was a moron, he was their moron, a give-no-fucks brat thumbing his nose at authority. He leaned into his nickname, selling Problem Child merch. But to anyone over 18, he was the embodiment of Gen Z entitlement. Deadspin called him “the worst person on Earth.”

His stunts grew more outlandish. (How else to feed the beast?) In 2021, Justine Paradise, a 24-year-old TikTok influencer, accused Paul of sexual assault—a claim he denied. (No charges were ever filed.) Still, the Jake Paulers continued to delight in the chaos, even more so as their hero started boxing, a dare that became a revenue stream and then something even more unlikely: a career. After 12 bouts, he’ll fight Mike Tyson live on Netflix for a reported $30 million in November.

When USA Boxing announced it was enlisting Paul as a partner for the Paris Olympics, the purists revolted. “We had some old-school boxing people that said, ‘You’re going to kill the sport,’ ” says Mike McAtee, the CEO of USA Boxing. Forget that the sport had been in a ratings free fall. There had to be some way to attract eyeballs other than the Problem Child, right?

That brings us to God’s plan. “I believe God is ushering me to change the world in many ways, inspiring so many people—in so many different ways—to go chase their dreams. I’m the living, breathing, most relatable version of that.” Here he invokes Anthony Edwards, the Minnesota Timberwolves player, saying, “You can jump 48 inches in the air? That’s not relatable. What’s relatable is the kid who was a Disney Channel actor and decided to start boxing, then seven years later is going to become a world champion.”

In 2024’s America, perhaps we get the hero we deserve: a yoked he-man with a checkered past, a koi pond, and his own line of body spray (W, as in winning, on sale exclusively at Walmart!). What makes a generation of young men want to smell like this guy? What made Netflix, USA Boxing, and Silicon Valley kingmaker Marc Andreessen want to jump in bed with him? Seven years ago, Jake Paul hadn’t thrown a punch (though surely he’d made a donkey-punch joke or two). Today, he’s the face of a sport that dates back to the ancient Greeks. The Lord may work in mysterious ways, but nobody, not even Jake Paul himself, saw this coming.

THE BACKDROP IN Dorado, Puerto Rico, is A+. Drive past the guardhouse, past the palm trees and the tropical lawns, and you’ll eventually come to Paul’s glass box, an eight-bedroom home he refers to as the “Taj MaPaul.” He’s funny like that. And he knows that a joke gets funnier when you take it to an absurd extreme. In the bathroom, hand towels are adorned with a Taj MaPaul logo, as are china plates in a cabinet. Fraternal-twin yellow Ferraris are parked in the garage. The house, it must be said, is so clean you could lick a protein shake off the floor.

It’s after 3:00 P.M. when we sit down to breakfast. Paul is shirtless in red trunks, his long, tan torso a tattooed canvas. He’s still waking up, he tells me, wiping sleep from his eyes as his chef delivers a plate of organic granola, fresh berries, and kefir. Late night? Not exactly, at least not in the way you're thinking 

“The fights are at night,” Paul says. “So we train to be awake at night. My schedule’s always really fucked up. If I’m training twice a day—especially sparring—adrenaline’s in your system and going to sleep at night is very difficult.”

The plan is to eat and then head down to the private beach to meditate. While an afternoon meditation session feels like something a publicist would orchestrate to soften a Cro-Magnon’s image, it’s what Paul would be doing today anyway. He’s been working with a meditation coach for the past four years, he says as we climb into a golf cart to drive toward the water. “There’s so many things that pull us away from our nature. Meditation can just bring you back to that true, animalistic self.”

He parks his golf cart at the beach and leaves his phone on the dashboard, saying, “I hate my phone.” I laugh, because the phone is what made him famous. “Yeah,” he says, “it’s kind of backward. I love what I do, but sometimes it’s just like, I would rather just box and live life without a phone, to be honest.” The phone, he says, is “just stress and cortisol.”

The fact that he hates the thing that pulled him out of a “random town” in Ohio is a lot to take in. If his life were a movie—and a loose adaptation is already in the works—it might open in his childhood home, amid his parents’ divorce. They would split custody of their kids. Gregory, a real estate agent and commercial roofer, struggles to pay the bills. He also hits his boys, a memory that still stings. Pam is a nurse. A note from her hangs in Paul’s locker in Puerto Rico years later. It reads: “You are built different Jake! I AM SO PROUD of you my eyes water!”

Jake and Logan start posting videos to Vine in 2013, and their humor is a time capsule of the social mores that year. In one clip, Jake quotes Scarface (“Say hello to my little friend!”), only to reveal he’s holding a little person like a tommy gun. In another, Jake climbs into a shopping cart in a store and hoists a sword, shouting, “For Narnia!” He and his brother are amusing and cute and often shirtless. The videos are far more lucrative than anyone could have imagined, and soon they sign deals with Ubisoft and Pepsi.

At 17, Paul moves to Los Angeles. Three years later, he settles in Calabasas and buys a $6.9 million manse, inviting other content creators to live with him in a “collab house.” But sometimes his content creation goes too far, such as when he electroshocks people without warning. One reporter accuses Paul of creating a circus, to which he replies: “People like going to circuses, right?” But it’s not all clowning. He has 15 people plus a creative director on the payroll helping him build a millennial social-media empire that has more than 20 million subscribers and generates $3 million per month.

Paul is the first to admit that things went a little sideways, but honestly, what did people think was going to happen when a high school dropout bought a 15,000-square-foot home before his frontal lobe was fully formed? “Your dopamine receptors get screwed up. You have to realize that,” he says. “Otherwise you’ll fall into depression when you stop buying things or stop accomplishing new things.”

I’m not out to make excuses for Paul, but every so-called villain has an origin story, too, and in his he starts out an underdog. “I was the laughingstock of my high school,” he says, “including the teachers. My principal was hating on me, actually talking shit about me to my face. And it broke my heart.” Later, he says, “when I started to gain viewership and money—first of all, I wanted to make my dad proud, mostly because I saw him lose everything in the divorce—I thought to myself, I’d never want to be in that position, [for] my kids to see me weak. I wanted to be successful so fucking bad that when I started to get the success, I just poured gas on the fire. I guess pun intended.”

He started boxing on a lark. It was 2018 and two British YouTubers, KSI and Deji (also brothers), challenged the Paul boys to a fight. Logan lost; Jake won. More than 800,000 people tuned in live on YouTube. The sales pitch was almost too easy: What would you pay to watch someone punch one of the most hated men in America in the face? When asked about Jake’s entertainment value, McAtee butchers a quote from the Greatest: “Muhammad Ali said it best. You can love me, you can hate me, I don’t care. Buy a ticket.”

IF YOU'RE A MAN OF FAITH, you might begin to see the Almighty’s fingerprints on this man’s life. Yeah, it’s 2024 and there’s a need for everything to mean something. But if you squint, Paul really is an avatar of millennial males’ misspent youth, the frontman for the first generation to go through puberty with a like button. Scientists are still trying to figure out how to measure the damage (or where to send the bill). But Paul the apostle is preaching hope that toxic masculinity has a short half-life.

Paul doesn’t use these words, but spend a few hours with him and it’s clear he sees himself as a prism through which we can understand the evolution of a specific (if very large) cohort of young men. “The world moved into a place of understanding cancel culture more and how a lot of it’s bullshit,” he says. “There are bad people who do bad things. But there are also people who just genuinely make mistakes. People definitely see my growth as a young man still learning and figuring myself out. And boxing is bringing my head to a really good place.”

Boxing came to him at exactly the right time. (Divine intervention, perhaps.) In 2018, several months before fighting KSI and Deji, YouTube demonetized the Paul brothers after a disturbing incident in a Japanese “suicide forest,” where Logan showed a dead body. Jake’s career was collateral damage. His big brother’s implosion forced Paul to turn inward at the ripe old age of 21. “I realized, Who am I? Why was I filming these videos? I don’t like the past three years of my life. I’m lost. I don’t want to do that anymore. But what do I do? Is it boxing? I don’t fucking know.”

Paul lost his cruiserweight fight with Tommy Fury by split decision on February 26, 2023.
FRANÇOIS NEL / GETTY IMAGES

Call it a sideshow. But when Paul made his pro-boxing debut in January 2020, knocking out another YouTuber, AnEsonGib, the fight trended on Twitter, garnering far more attention than the evening’s main event. Paul made several million dollars that night.

Without a clear path, he started to train, a journey he documented online. He felt calmer, stronger. He’d caught the bug. But the public (and the sport) remained unconvinced. Later in 2020, when Paul announced he was fighting the former NBA star Nate Robinson, boxing promoter Lou DiBella was disgusted, saying, “The idea that I gotta watch Jake Paul or some of these other numbnuts fighting ex-pro football players—who the fuck wants to see that?”

A lot of people, apparently. The Robinson fight sold 1.8 million tickets. Still, the rap on Paul’s boxing career—which currently stands at 10–1—was that he only fought curiosities. You know, washed-up UFC stars, former NBA players, and (come November, against Tyson) old people. When he fought an actual boxer, Tommy Fury, in 2023, he lost.

Paul’s team will remind you that he lost that fight in a split decision. But what’s more revealing is that after the fight—which he called the biggest L of his life—he fired his coach and doubled down on the sport. This year, he knocked out former Golden Glove winner Ryan Bourland and bare-knuckle king Mike Perry. He’s kept at it. Because there was a time when Paul could have had anything (and anyone) he wanted, yet all he felt was numb. There was something honest about boxing. When you enter the ring with a fighter, even 27 million Instagram followers can’t save you.

EARLY ON, PAUL leaned into playing the cartoon villain, but now he’s revealing he wasn’t drawn in 2D. Like other provocateurs who speak to extremely online young men—think Theo Von or Andrew Tate—Paul is prone to spouting what’s in his feed, and often that’s pseudoscience. In a recent episode of his podcast, he riffed on whether Big Pharma wants Americans to get diabetes to boost profits. He also said he had heard drinking from plastic water bottles for a week is equivalent to ingesting a plastic credit card. He is, unsurprisingly, a Trump supporter. I ask if he feels he has a duty to get it right, considering he’s speaking to 27 million followers. “Yeah,” he mutters. “I guess. I believe that if I know or feel what’s best, then I feel like I have a responsibility to voice my opinion.”

But unlike Tate or Von or even Joe Rogan, Paul seems to crave mainstream acceptance. He doesn’t want to burn boxing to the ground; he wants to remake it from the inside. In 2021, Paul launched Most Valuable Promotions with Nakisa Bidarian, a former UFC executive. One of their first signings was Amanda Serrano, a star in women’s boxing who was somehow making “$5,000 a fight,” Paul says. “She’s this vicious, exciting fighter” who had won championships in seven different weight classes. “The only other person to do that is Manny Pacquiao.” With Paul promoting her, Serrano became the first female fighter to earn a $1 million purse.

CLAY PATRICK MCBRIDE / SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

In late 2023, even USA Boxing couldn’t ignore Paul anymore. In fact, by naming him a partner for the Olympics, it brought him into the fold. Paul flew to Colorado to tutor athletes in the dark arts of social media. Perhaps God (and USA Boxing) recognized the same quality in him: His great gift isn’t in the ring but in his ability to communicate with his flock, because he is one of them.

I laughed when I heard he was launching a deodorant line—sorry, a grooming line. But it’s shrewd. He eschewed an alcohol deal because “every fucking celebrity has an alcohol. You can’t differentiate it.” But the fans who once devoured Paul’s idiotic short-form content had become millennials concerned about hormones and microplastics. W’s packaging doesn’t say Jake Paul on it. But it shouts, “No weird stuff.” He can talk your ear off about parabens.

“I’m just playing in areas where I know I can generate interest,” says Paul, proclaiming that every W product will cost less than $10. W is already valued at more than $150 million and has investors like Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin and tennis star Naomi Osaka. Paul is also diversifying. He and investor Geoffrey Woo launched a venture-capital fund called Anti Fund in 2021, which incubated W and backed an AI-powered military defense company, Anduril. Andreessen, the uber venture capitalist, was one of Anti Fund’s first backers. Meanwhile, Paul’s sports-gambling app, Betr, launched in 2022 and has a $375 million valuation.

Paul in his role as boxing ambassador, conducting ceremonies as Francis Ngannou and Renan Ferreira face-off in August 2024.
COOPER NEILL / GETTY IMAGES

His success outside the ring makes his decision to step into it for the fight against Tyson at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, seem risky. The age gap between Paul and Tyson is 31 years—the biggest in the history of pro boxing. Still, oddsmakers are split on who will win. “Power’s the last to go,” says McAtee, invoking the belief that Tyson has a puncher’s chance. The stakes are real, insists Bidarian, who says bluntly, “If Jake loses to Mike Tyson—if he couldn’t beat a 58-year-old—he’s written off within professional boxing.”

Anticipating Tyson’s uppercut, Paul has been working on fighting in the pocket, reminding me, “It’s Mike Tyson.” But it’s not about this one fight. It’s part of his quest to claim the cruiserweight title. “I’m slowly improving with each camp,” he says.

Zooming out, winning may be better measured through a different lens. “We believe it’s going to be the most streamed sporting event in U. S. history,” says Bidarian. He suggests that Paul change his nickname to the American Dream.

PAUL COMES DOWN to the beach twice a week to meditate, he tells me. We sit on the sand, cross-legged, in silence. The waves lap against the shore, the sun stupid hot, but he remains still, inhaling deeply, then breathing out. Before every fight, he repeats the same mantra to himself: “I, Jake Paul, will knock out, defeat, and embarrass—and then I put my opponent’s name.” He will do the same for the Tyson fight. When I steal a glance at him, he is poking himself in the forehead, an attempt to open his third eye.

Thoughts come and go as Paul meditates. Today, his inner voice advises him to focus on rest. “I’ve been going so hard,” he says, “especially this week with the W launch. It was like, Yo, you need to chill and—after we’re done with this—just lay in bed and go to sleep.” I point out he would have more free time if he didn’t have so many business interests.

“I know,” he says. “This is what my girlfriend says to me.” He continues: “I like going to Walmart and seeing W in person and making funny videos. I don’t like having to fucking micromanage employees.”

Paul’s girlfriend is the Dutch speed skater Jutta Leerdam, a towering blonde who won a silver medal at 2022’s Beijing Olympics. The two met on Instagram (duh) and appear to be in love. “We have this childlike way of loving each other,” Paul says. “We also both have the discipline and the old-school values. We just fully understand each other as athletes.”

Speaking of relationships, Paul and his father are in a good place, he tells me. “I think he just had to understand his wrongs and acknowledge them. And I don’t hold it against him or anything. Like, Yeah, I did that. Yeah, I fucked up.” You mean acknowledging that he hit you? I ask. “Yeah, exactly. Just, the whole divorce and everything around it was nasty. And him acknowledging that.”

With that, we come back to where we started: God’s purpose for Jake Paul and the sweet science. Of the sport of boxing, Paul says, “I think as animals, we need to express ourselves through different forms of violence—in a healthy way, obviously. Boxing gives people that. It’s an art form. It’s an expression of myself. I’m letting this creativity and these punches flow through me.” He adds, “Hopefully this generation can find the same love for boxing that I did. I had to fix me before I could fix the world. And that took time.

“My life-coach-slash-therapist has been saying this for years. ‘You’re not the Problem Child at all. You’re actually the Solution Child.’

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