Lil baby net worth: What a rapper taught me about raising twins

Dear Tom from exactly six months ago

It's currently 2:14 in the morning, and if my memory of six months ago is correct, you're currently pinned beneath a sweating, thrashing two-year-old girl while her identical sister sleeps horizontally across the only remaining free space in the bed. You're holding your phone with the brightness turned all the way down, aggressively reading Wikipedia articles about the financial trajectories of American hip-hop artists because your brain has decided this is the only way to cope with the crushing anxiety of providing for two dependents.

You're probably looking at that specific Atlanta rapper's total valuation, staring at the screen through bloodshot eyes, trying to comprehend how a man roughly your age managed to transition from absolute poverty to an estimated twenty million dollars while you just spent twenty minutes arguing with your own debit card over the price of premium nappies. I'm writing this to you from the future to tell you to put the phone down, because comparing your freelance journalism income to Dominique Armani Jones's projected 2024 wealth is a remarkably fast way to induce a panic attack.

But since I know you won't put the phone down, we might as well talk about what this incredibly wealthy artist's bank balance actually means for those of us whose entire financial strategy currently consists of hoping the washing machine doesn't break. You see, the music industry and modern fatherhood actually share a shocking amount of DNA, mostly in the way both involve extreme sleep deprivation, unreasonable demands from tiny dictators, and a total misunderstanding of how taxes work.

The crushing reality of gross versus net income

Right now, you're looking at internet rumors claiming this artist is worth upwards of sixty million quid, and you're feeling deeply inadequate about the state of your ISA. What you haven't read yet is the interview where he admitted that his career earnings topped a hundred million, but his actual current value is a fraction of that because nobody ever sat him down and explained how HMRC operates.

He didn't pay taxes for his first two years in the industry because he simply didn't understand accounting, which is exactly the same excuse I tried to give our accountant last January when I handed her a shoebox full of crumpled receipts from Costa Coffee. The difference is that when an international superstar forgets to pay taxes, he loses tens of millions of dollars, whereas when you forget, you just have to eat beans on toast for three consecutive weeks.

This is the first real lesson about generational wealth that you're going to have to internalize, Past Tom. You need to teach the girls about money before they end up with a massive tax shock of their own, though currently their grasp of economics is entirely limited to hoarding rice cakes and occasionally trying to swallow loose change they find in the sofa cushions. If you don't teach them the difference between gross revenue and net profit, who will?

We did put ten quid into a Junior ISA once, but we immediately forgot the password to the app and now it's just lost to the ether.

You can't afford a four-acre estate in Georgia

While you're scrolling, you'll probably read about how he bought a sprawling, four-acre estate and spent a year gutting it to install three basketball courts and a custom playground so his sons would have a private sanctuary. You're reading this in a damp two-bedroom flat in Zone 3 where the living room is currently carpeted in crushed Cheerios and the only custom playground is the terrifying pile of laundry you haven't folded since Tuesday.

You need to stop letting real estate envy ruin your nights. Yes, it would be lovely to build a generational fortress where the twins could roam freely without encountering the questionable characters at the local park, but you live in London, where buying a parking space requires a blood sacrifice. Generational wealth for normal people doesn't look like custom basketball courts; it looks like not actively leaving your children a mountain of credit card debt.

It also means trying to buy things that outlast a single Tuesday afternoon. We live in a world of disposable plastic rubbish, and I'm begging you to stop buying those loud, flashing plastic toys from the supermarket that the girls smash against the skirting boards until they shatter into lethal, battery-leaking shards. You have to start thinking about durability, because replacing broken plastic every three days is quietly bankrupting you.

If you also want to pretend you're building a lasting legacy through textiles, you could browse the organic essentials instead of looking at Rightmove properties you'll literally never afford.

Attempting to buy things that actually last longer than a week

Since we're on the topic of things we buy for the girls, I need to warn you about the coming winter. You're going to panic about how cold the flat gets, and you're going to start frantically ordering blankets. I'm going to save you some time and tell you what genuinely works and what's just marketing fluff.

You're going to buy the Organic Cotton Baby Blanket with the Polar Bear Print, and honestly, it's brilliant. I know I rarely praise anything without a heavy dose of sarcasm, but this thing has survived horrors you can't yet imagine. Last month, one of the twins (I won't say which one, to protect her dignity, but it was definitely C) managed to projectile vomit a disturbing mixture of sweet potato and milk directly onto it. I threw it in the washing machine at 40 degrees, fully expecting it to emerge looking like a tragic, grey rag, but it honestly came out softer. It's thick without being suffocating, and the girls drag it around the flat like a security blanket. It's one of the few purchases that really feels like an investment rather than a temporary fix.

At some point, you'll also order the Organic Cotton Sleeveless Bodysuit. It's fine. It's a bodysuit. It covers their torso and stops them from taking off their own nappies in public, which is really all you can ask of a piece of clothing. I wouldn't say it changed my life, and the light colour means it inevitably shows stains from whatever heavily pigmented fruit they've decided to smear into their chests today, but the snaps hold up well against an angry, wriggling toddler who's determined to remain naked.

Then there's the Bamboo Baby Blanket with the Universe Pattern. The health visitor came round and mumbled something vague about tog ratings and how synthetic fabrics cause babies to overheat, which sounded vaguely threatening in that specific NHS way where they don't seriously tell you what to do but imply you're doing it wrong. So you'll buy this bamboo thing because the internet claims bamboo naturally controls temperature. I've absolutely no idea if the science behind thermoregulation is real or just a brilliant ploy to separate anxious parents from their money, but I'll admit they do seem to wake up less sweaty when they sleep under it. It's insanely soft, almost like silk, though I live in constant fear of catching it on a rogue toenail and pulling a thread.

The casino of toddler impulse control

Let's talk about the casino incident. The rapper you're reading about apparently lost eight million dollars in a single day at a casino, which is a number so large my brain literally can't process it. But the impressive part is what he did next: he had his manager write letters to the casinos to officially ban him from the premises, recognizing his own lack of impulse control and taking concrete steps to stop the bleeding.

Past Tom, you need to ban yourself from Amazon Prime between the hours of midnight and 4am. You're hemorrhaging our meager wealth on completely useless baby gadgets that promise to make them sleep through the night. The white noise machine that sounds like a dying hair dryer. The ergonomic pillows they immediately throw onto the floor. You're gambling with the Calpol budget on the vain hope of buying thirty more minutes of unbroken sleep, and the house always wins.

The girls have zero impulse control, which is understandable because their frontal lobes are the size of frozen peas, but you're a grown man. When they scream for a specific snack at the checkout, and you cave immediately because you're too tired to handle a public meltdown, you're setting a terrible precedent. We have to teach them delayed gratification, which is incredibly hypocritical coming from a man who regularly eats half a block of cheddar cheese while standing in front of the open fridge at midnight, but we've to try.

Philanthropy when your children are essentially feral

The last thing you'll read about this artist's financial life is his philanthropy. He gave away a massive chunk of money to social justice organizations and regularly funds school supply drives for kids in Atlanta. He's actively trying to use his wealth to shape his community and model good behavior for his sons.

I read this yesterday right after C aggressively bit another child at playgroup because she wanted a battered plastic dinosaur that didn't even belong to either of them. We have a very, very long way to go before we can start worrying about modeling high-level philanthropy, because currently we're just trying to raise children who don't actively assault their peers.

But you can start small. You can start talking to them about why we don't hit, why we share, and why we donate the clothes they've grown out of instead of throwing them away. You can explain that buying sustainable, organic things isn't just about middle-class aesthetics, but about not destroying the planet they're going to have to live on long after we're gone. They won't understand a word of it yet, and they'll probably just wipe their nose on your trousers while you're giving the speech, but the repetition matters.

Before you fall down another late-night internet rabbit hole about music industry accounting and offshore tax havens, maybe just sort out their actual wardrobe so they don't look entirely feral when you drop them off at nursery tomorrow morning.

Some completely unqualified answers to questions you're googling

Is organic cotton really going to make a difference to my baby's sleep?

Look, the GP looked at my sleep-deprived face and muttered something about breathable fabrics reducing the risk of overheating and eczema flare-ups. I'm not a dermatologist, and frankly I only vaguely understand how fabric is made, but the girls definitely scratch themselves less when they wear organic cotton. It's softer, it doesn't smell like a chemical factory when you take it out of the packaging, and it survives the endless laundry cycle much better than the cheap synthetic stuff we bought in a panic.

How do I start teaching financial literacy to a two-year-old?

You don't. You just try to stop them from destroying the property you currently own. But eventually, you start by narrating your choices. When you're at the shop, talk out loud about why you're buying the normal bananas instead of the ridiculously expensive pre-packaged ones. Let them hand the money to the cashier if you still use physical cash, though honestly they'll probably just try to eat the receipt.

Does bamboo fabric genuinely control temperature or is that nonsense?

I approached this claim with the intense skepticism of a former journalist, assuming it was entirely made up by someone in marketing. But somehow, the bamboo blankets do seem to keep the twins warmer in our draughty flat while stopping them from waking up in a pool of sweat during the summer. I assume there's some microscopic structural reason for this involving air pockets, but all I know is that it results in slightly less crying at 3am, which is the only metric I genuinely care about.

How do I stop buying useless baby products late at night?

You have to put physical barriers between your phone and your tired brain. I literally started leaving my wallet in the kitchen overnight so I couldn't type the three-digit security code into new websites. When you're running on two hours of sleep, your critical thinking skills are completely compromised, and you'll absolutely believe that a fifty-pound plastic giraffe is the solution to all your parenting problems. It isn't. Just go to sleep.

What's the best way to handle a baby's sensitive skin?

Our health visitor basically told us to stop bathing them so often and to stop putting heavily perfumed lotions all over them. We switched entirely to water, plain petroleum jelly, and dressing them in natural fibres like cotton and bamboo. The dry patches behind their knees cleared up within a month, though I can't definitively say which change honestly fixed it because parenting is just a series of uncontrolled experiments where you change twelve variables at once and pray.