A Reporter at Large - One for the Money

How to hire a pop star for your private party.

- By Evan Osnos. Photograph by Victor Llorente

If you have a few million dollars to spare, you can get Drake for a bar mitzvah or The Rolling Stones for a birthday. Flo Rida, a veteran of the private-gig market, has honed a rutine. "I come for a purpose," he says.

At ten o’clock on a recent Saturday night, the rapper Flo Rida was in his dressing room with a towel over his head, in a mode of quiet preparation. Along one wall, a handsome buffet—lobster, sushi, Dom Pérignon—sat untouched. Flo Rida, whose stage name honors his home state but is pronounced like “flow rider,” is fastidious about his physique. He is six feet three, two hundred and twenty pounds, and often travels with a trainer, though on this occasion the trip was brief enough that he would do without. That afternoon, a private jet had carried him, along with eight of his backup performers and assistants, from South Florida to Chicago. By the following night, he would be back at his mansion in Miami.