MICHAEL RUBIN AND Lil Baby first met in the Bahamas. The CEO and the rapper found themselves, in January 2021, sitting around the same baccarat table with their mutual friends Drake and Meek Mill. Baby had begun making music a few years earlier after serving two years related to drug and weapon charges in Atlanta. Now, like the two other rappers placing their bets, he was beginning to mix with billionaire businessmen.
"We ain't win," Baby recently recalled. "We had a great night, though."
As with Drake and Meek, Rubin, 51, struck up a friendship with the 28-year-old rapper. Each of the three has recorded lyrics about him, but Baby put it the most bluntly on a 2022 song: "I get my advice from Mike Rubin." "He's got the best story ever," Rubin said, sitting nearby. "Because this guy didn't even rap until he got out of prison, and it shows you, you can do anything at any time in your life." They were in a Sprinter van on a Tuesday morning in June, heading from a Harlem school to get to Rubin's company jet at LaGuardia. Fanatics, the sports merchandise business (jerseys, cards, more) that Rubin has run since 2011, was holding its inaugural Merch Madness event. In cities including Los Angeles, Miami, and Dallas, a wealth of athletes and musicians including Donovan Mitchell, DJ Khaled, Quavo, and Chris Paul-most of them personal friends of Rubin's-gave out licensed apparel to local kids and families in need. It was an instance of the philanthropic bent Rubin has demonstrated in recent years as well as of the eye-popping and mildly befuddling constellation of personalities he has assembled around himself over the same period.
Rubin and Baby boarded the plane.
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MURDER AT HAMMERSMITH FARM
Two months before his assassination, JOHN and JACKIE KENNEDY wrote, directed, and acted in a James Bondinspired home movie in which the president was \"killed.\" VF reveals the story behind the spoof, along with neverbefore-seen footage from that day
ALL HER OWN
Joan Didion's marriage was one of the most revered in American letters. But before there was John Gregory Dunne, there was Noel Parmentel Jr.-the man who broke her heart. As LILI ANOLIK reveals in this excerpt from Didion and Babitz, the devastation lasted a lifetime
MC QUEEN'S GAMBIT
IS STEVE MCQUEEN A HOLLYWOOD DIRECTOR WITH A THRIVING FINE ARTS PRACTICE OR A THRIVING FINE ARTIST WITH AN IMPECCABLE HOLLYWOOD STREAK? HIS WORLD WAR II EPIC, BLITZ, IS ANOTHER VIRTUOSO WORK IN A CAREER FULL OF THEM
STAR STRUCK Hollywood 2025
It's the MOST AUDACIOUS ACTORS who POWER HOLLYWOOD and THRILL AUDIENCES. VF TOASTS 12 of the INDUSTRY'S BRIGHTEST LIGHTS
The Tie That BLINDS
When the news broke that Matthew Perry’s personal assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, would face up to 15 years in prison for illegally procuring the ketamine that led to the actor’s death, a shudder went through assistants all over the entertainment industry.
Boys and Their Toys - Inside the hypermacho, Bible-thumping alt-tech universe trying to take on Silicon Valley-from El Segundo
For more than two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, California, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies. They call what they are building real shit—not like what the software engineers make up north, writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: They spend their workdays toiling in labs and manufacturing lines, their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds. Some are making drones to try to control the weather. Others are building nuclear reactors and military weaponry designed to fight Russia and China.
Vanities - Maisy Stella knows how to think outside the box
Maisy Stella didn’t have a TV as a kid because her musician parents didn’t want her and her older sister, Lennon, tuning in and tuning out. So the girls used their imaginations. “My sister made a cardboardbox TV that I would get in, and she had a fake cardboard remote,” Stella says. “I’d do a baking show, and then she’d be like, ‘Soap opera!’ and I’d be like, ‘You killed my husband!’ We would do that for hours. That was our entertainment.” Only later, when the girls landed roles as Connie Britton’s children on the country music drama Nashville, did their mother and father relent. “We bought a TV the day that me and my sister got on TV.”
A House Divided
The Mellon dynasty has long been known for its old money refinement and discretion. But when TIM MELLON became Donald Trump's biggest donor many members of the family were mystified-and not afraid to talk about it
FUNNY BUSINESS
NEARLY 50 YEARS AGO, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE LAUNCHED A REVOLUTION THAT CHANGED COMEDY, TELEVISION, AND THE MOVIES. NOW DIRECTOR JASON REITMAN HAS RE-CREATED THE CHAOTIC HOURS BEFORE SNL'S FIRST EPISODE. LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S 1975!
BAD FAITH
From exiled actors to academics, influencers to intellectuals, VF gets under the hood of the Catholic right's celebrity conversion industrial complex
