For the Love of Money

 Boxing’s flamboyant former pound-for-pound king is still the undisputed champion of Sin City.

- Michael Kaplan

Floyd Mayweather may have left boxing, but his presence still looms large over Las Vegas. Parking valets covet the $100 bills he gives them to ensure they look after his $3.5 million Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse. Faces of casino bosses light up as Mayweather commandeers a craps table or places gargantuan sports wagers, which are often posted on Instagram when a winning slip yields a particularly outrageous six-figure sum. Auto dealer Josh “Chop” Towbin jumps out of bed at 3 A.M. when the call comes that the famously nocturnal Mayweather wants to do a little early morning Bentley shopping. And if the teetotaling boxing great wants to go club-hopping, last-minute texts ricochet out to his crew members and a posse as large as 20 convenes at hot spots like Drai’s, Encore Beach Club, and Spearmint Rhino, the topless temple where Mayweather, a one-man revenue booster for Vegas, might walk in cradling bricks of cash worth $50,000 before making it rain on appreciative dancers. “We’ll spend four hours in the place,” marvels a member of Mayweather’s The Money Team. “By the time we leave, I look down at the floor and think, Shit, right there is a down payment on a house.”

In the wake of his 2015 retirement from the sport he dominated for 17 years (he won his first world championship title in 1998), Mayweather, also known as Money and TBE (“The Best Ever”), is living large and relishing the freedom of being fight-free. “He’s going everywhere, doing whatever he wants to do, having no schedule,” says a Money Team member. “He wanted to go to Miami Beach for a week and wound up staying for a month at the Fontainebleau. He needed a car to get around in, so he bought a Jeep and a Bugatti. Then he hit Vegas for a day before flying to Moscow. And then he hit Monte Carlo, to hang out with some friends. Floyd just fires up the jet and takes off.”