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Bryan "Birdman" Williams ranks 4th on this year's Hip-Hop Cash Kings list.

Bryan “Birdman” Williams might be best described as a Frankenstein of conspicuous consumption. Standing outside the studios of 106 & Park in midtown Manhattan, he sports a necklace of gumball-sized diamonds; gems cling to his wristwatch like barnacles to a whale. Even his skin is covered in tattoos of red stars and flaming dollar signs. Every time he opens his mouth, the monstrous diamond grills adorning his teeth sparkle in the midday sun.
Asked about the worth of orthodontic work in mouth, he doesn’t hesitate for a moment: “Half a million.” He grins. “I try to wear $1 million a day. At least.”
Though such tastes may seem a tad nouveau riche, Birdman has been doing this for decades. As a prominent rapper and co-founder of Cash Money Records, he’s had plenty of opportunities to flaunt his wealth—and plenty of wealth to flaunt. He raked in $15 million over the past year alone, mostly thanks to his share of his label’s profits, fueled by the success of fellow Cash Kings Lil Wayne, Drake, Nicki Minaj and others. Birdman has had a hand in over 90 million records sold, amassing a personal fortune of $100 million by FORBES’ last count. For Birdman, that estimate is something of an indignity.
Full Coverage: Hip-Hop Cash Kings 2011
“I just felt $100 million was low,” he says, wrapping each word in a deep Louisiana drawl. “With all the different entities, I think I should still be a lot more than that. $500 million. $250 million, easy … As a child I always felt if I could make $1 million, I could make $100 million. If I could get $100 million, I’m just nine steps away from being a billionaire. And that’s the goal.”

Excluded from previous Cash Kings annual earnings lists because we deemed him more executive than rapper, Birdman was included this year because most of his peers now have a similar job description. His earning power—and his spending power—puts most of them to shame. He’s been known to show up at night clubs to throw as much as $100,000 into the crowd, and boasts that he keeps $1 million in cash under his mattress.

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He claims he recently lost $2 million on a single bet on the Miami Heat; to balance this out, he plans to place a seven-figure bet on boxer Floyd Mayweather’s match in September. (“And when he fights Pacquiao,” Birdman adds gleefully, “I’m going to bet $10 million.”)
Birdman is spending money like it’s going out of style—and in a sense, it is. Many of hip-hop’s most successful artists have traded glitz and glamour for relative understatement. Perhaps nobody phrased this trend more clearly than Jay-Z, who rapped five years ago that he was “old enough to know the right car to buy, yet grown enough not to put rims on it.”
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The word “bling” itself, which Cash Money’s own Lil Wayne once claimed to have invented, has become essentially verboten for aficionados. The bell may have tolled for the term when it was added to the Merriam Webster dictionary in 2006, or maybe two years later when Mitt Romney uttered the word on the campaign trail. These days its use is reserved strictly for irony and painful attempts by Baby Boomers to get down with the lingo of a younger generation.
Apart from the term itself, the decline of the world economy seems to have made some artists reluctant to broadcast their earnings; Young Jeezy even called a recent album “The Recession.” Birdman doesn’t seem overly concerned—last year he picked up a shiny red Bugatti Veyron for $2 million; in March, he showed off a new $1.5 million Maybach Landaulet; the following month, he tweeted that he’d purchased another for $8 million. So does all this spending make Birdman’s advisors a bit nervous?
“How could I not get nervous?” says business manager Vernon Brown, who’s been working with Birdman for the better part of two decades. “We scream and shout about it, but we’ve been screaming and shouting for 15 years. Basically, he never risks more than he has in his pocket, and he wouldn’t even think of risking anything in his bank account.”