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Love him or hate him, Sean John Combs is one of the biggest players in the rap industry today. Known by an ever-permutating array of stage names (among them Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, Diddy, and Puffy), the New York City-born Combs is not just another rapper, but also a record producer, promoter, actor, fashion designer, and entrepreneur worth an estimated $680 million - a fortune rivaled only by fellow New York hip-hop renaissance man Jay-Z.

After growing up amidst the rougher neighborhoods of Harlem, Sean Combs got his start in the music industry while attending Howard University in the early 1990’s, working as both an intern at Uptown Records and as a party promoter. Though he would eventually drop out of college and be fired from his job at Uptown (where he had signed Mary J. Blige), Sean used the connections he had fostered to create his own record label, Bad Boy Records, in 1993. His first act as CEO was to sign The Notorious B.I.G., who proved to become the cornerstone of the East Coast rap movement until his untimely death in 1997.

After The Notorious B.I.G.’s death, Combs attempted to distance his label from the firestorm of negative publicity surrounding the East Coast/West Coast hip-hop rivalry of the mid-1990’s by signing a more diverse spread of artists to Bad Boy, including R&B artists like TLC, Mariah Carey, and Aretha Franklin. By the end of the 1990’s Combs had successfully established himself as a crossover producer, working with acts like *NSYNC and Britney Spears that, while popular, would have had no place in Bad Boy’s roster just a few years earlier. Bad Boy remains a powerful label to this day, with new releases in 2008 by Lil’ Jon, Danity Kane, and Elephant Man rounding out its offerings.