Puffed Up

DJ/producer Marshmello is so popular that he has upgraded to a $55,000 helmet.

- Zack O'malley Greenburg

Three years ago, a mysterious man arrived at Los Angeles International Airport with his head encased in a rigid 13.5-pound helmet shaped like a marshmallow. He reluctantly removed the fragile apparatus at the behest of a TSA agent and fed it through an X-ray machine. When he went to retrieve it, his worst fears were confirmed. “It was cracked,” the headpiece’s owner, incognito DJ-producer Marshmello, told Forbes in a rare interview.

Nowadays he can afford to fly private. Marshmello earned $44 million over the past two years, thanks to six-figure nightly fees and crossover hits like “Happier” (with Bastille) and “Wolves” (with Selena Gomez). Puffed up by his series, Cooking With Marshmello, his YouTube channel is now the 50th largest on the planet—behind Bruno Mars and ahead of Maroon 5—averaging 250 million views and 1.4 million new subscribers every month.

“What sets the world’s greatest DJs apart is that they are also great producers and songwriters, creating songs that transcend genre and appeal to a global pop audience,” says Robb McDaniels, CEO of Beatport, the electronic music hub. “Marshmello is one of the select few who have defined this generation.”

Success has allowed Marshmello to upgrade to a $55,000 helmet that has an internal air-conditioning system and programmable LED lights and weighs just 8 pounds. More important, the headgear has turned into a transcendent symbol that has placed Marshmello among the world’s five highest-earning DJs even as he refuses to obey the music industry’s rules: He still hasn’t signed a major label record deal, much less shown his face in public.