From his “Taj MaPaul” mansion in Puerto Rico, the Trump-loving heavyweight champ of viral trolldom talks about bouncing back from punchline to powerhouse as he prepares to meet Mike Tyson in the biggest boxing match of all time.
What does it feel like to take a punch to the face from a legit boxer?
Since turning his attention full time to the sport in 2020, Jake Paul, 27, has absorbed his share of them — first from fellow YouTubers, then pro athletes, then MMA fighters and now from actual boxers.
“Eighty-five percent of the hits you don’t really feel — but then there’s that other 15 percent,” Jake says, munching on an omelet and a bowl of berries on the poolside terrace of his compound in Puerto Rico.
The island has been home to Jake and his older brother, 29-year-old YouTuber turned WWE wrestler Logan Paul, since late 2020. Many assume it’s to avoid paying federal taxes on passive income, which the territory’s Act 60 allows as a means of promoting local investment. To that, Jake responds, “This is the most beautiful place in the world, and it’s my home and I wouldn’t live somewhere that I don’t absolutely love.” It also happens to be a spot that, like Jake, is obsessed with boxing.
With his wiry blond goatee and a towel wrapped across his torso like a toga, he suggests Zeus sitting atop Mount Olympus. It’s hot out here — a sultry heat that feels much warmer than the temperature, currently 91 degrees.
Jake purchased the home in Dorado — what a local tells me is the “Beverly Hills of Puerto Rico” — in 2023. Old habits being hard to break, the boy who made it big posting outrageous, aspirational content promptly showed it off to his 21 million YouTube followers in a video titled “My New $16,000,000 House.”
It’s a modernist manse, all white walls and marble flooring covered in mats that say “Taj MaPaul.” Massive sculptures of moon men and gorillas line the pool, which features a jacuzzi-sized ice bath. It’s the kind of house Rocky Balboa wouldn’t have been able to afford until Rocky III.
“See, those hard punches cause you to lose your senses a bit,” Jake continues, his personal nutritionist — a former cook to UFC superstar Conor McGregor — hovering nearby. “Then you get blurry vision. It makes you tired in a weird way. I think your body sends oxygen to your brain and it makes you sleepy. It definitely hurts — but that’s the fourth thing you think about. You’re kind of like, ‘Oh, shit. That’s not good. If he lands another one of those, I might start wobbling.’ ”
But what if the punch comes from boxing god Mike Tyson, proprietor of the stealthiest, deadliest uppercut in the sport’s history? The Mike Tyson who famously said, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face”?
That Mike Tyson.
Jake will find out soon enough, when he steps into the ring with the 58-year-old legend on Nov. 15 at AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys.
This is their second attempt at battle. The first was scheduled for July 20 but was postponed after Tyson suffered an ulcer flare-up — the kind of hiccup you might expect for a man pushing 60.
This time around, all parties assure the fight will go on, rain or shine, ulcer or not. More than 70,000 fans will be there to watch it in person. That’s an astounding number for a sport that has been steadily bleeding audience share since its 1980s peak — back when Tyson ruled the planet as the undisputed T. rex of the sport — to faster-paced and flashier MMA fighting.
But that’s just inside the stadium. Outside, an additional 270 million Netflix subscribers will be able to watch the fight from the comfort of their own homes — no PPV fees required — for the mega-streamer’s biggest foray yet into the world of live sports.
How big? If the appeal is to watch Jake — who since his teens, along with Logan, has been a ubiquitous (some might say annoying) online presence with too much money and not enough adult supervision — get pummeled to a pulp by one of the most fearsome fighters to ever climb into a ring, it appears to be working.
While Netflix won’t speak to global viewership expectations, the Super Bowl comes up in off-the-record conversations as an only slightly outlandish aspirational benchmark — and 124 million tuned in for Super Bowl LVIII. (Jake has predicted 25 million, which would make it the most-watched boxing match of all time.)
Netflix and Most Valuable Promotions — the company Jake founded with his manager, former UFC chief financial officer Nakisa Bidarian, 46, in 2021 — won’t say what the purse is. But in true Jake Paul fashion, he let it slip at a press conference that he’s making $40 million for the bout.
Tyson, meanwhile, who oddsmakers have as the underdog — he is 30 years older, after all, and his last two fights resulted in a loss and a draw — is rumored to be making half of that.
Jimmy Kimmel floated the $20 million figure during Tyson’s recent visit to his show, which Tyson did not dispute. In the same interview, Tyson, a big proponent of magic mushrooms and marijuana, also teased, perhaps jokingly, that he could be on some kind of mind-altering substance during the fight. Both are banned substances in sanctioned fights — which this fight is, meaning the outcome will affect their professional records — and the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, which sanctioned the fight, has been put on, uh, high alert.
Despite what the oddsmakers say, however, Bidarian sees the fight as “pretty evenly matched at this stage of their careers — and Jake may not like me saying that.”
Jake has been fighting for only four years, during which he’s had 10 fights and one loss — against Tommy Fury. Then again, Fury has to date been his most serious competition, an imposing professional boxer from a British fighting dynasty (plus a Love Island reality star, matching Jake’s showmanship). Despite Jake having successfully knocked Fury down at one point in the fight, Fury won the match, held with great fanfare in Saudi Arabia in February 2023, by controversial split decision.
Tyson, meanwhile, has not had a sanctioned fight since 2005, when he lost to Irish heavyweight Kevin McBride. He did not fight again until the November 2020 “Lockdown Knockdown.” Held at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tyson and former heavyweight champ Roy Jones Jr. — then already in his 50s — sparred in an exhibition match inside an empty Staples Center in Los Angeles. Unlike Paul vs. Tyson, the smell of blood was not particularly in the air. Despite selling 1.6 million PPV buys and generating $80 million, the fight, which resulted in a draw, was generally considered a snooze.
The one highlight was the undercard, when a then joke of a prospect named Jake Paul took on muscular former NBA player Nate Robinson. Though Robinson, diminutive for a baller at 5-foot-9 (Jake is 6-foot-1), was suffering from kidney disease, he was far and away the favorite — until Paul gave him a one-way ticket to the mat, face-first and unconscious, in the second round. That viral knockout instantly transformed Jake from a boxing joke into somewhat less of a boxing joke with a mean right hook.
Could Jake sustain the momentum? To everyone’s amazement, he did, beating (after mercilessly taunting) UFC fighters Ben Askren, Tyron Woodley and even the mighty MMA champ Anderson Silva. It was all going so well — until Tommy Fury. Naturally, when the opportunity for a Netflix fight arose — discussions came directly out of the success of Untold: Jake Paul the Problem Child, a 2023 Netflix doc about Jake’s unlikely rise in the sport — a Fury rematch was the logical choice. But then Tyson threw his name in the ring.
“I think once you hear Mike Tyson’s name as a potential opponent, it’s hard to unhear it,” says Gabe Spitzer, vp at Netflix Sports. “He’s obviously a massive global superstar, and for us being a global company, we’re looking for those big, global events that can add net value to our members anywhere. We started speaking to Mike’s team along with MVP and closed the deal this year right before we announced it.”
With the rumored $60 million between them already in the bank before a single punch is thrown, it could be argued that it doesn’t really matter who knocks whom out — both fighters are coming out winners. But, according to Bidarian, it matters a great deal.
“For Mike Tyson, this is his opportunity for redemption,” he says, laying out the stakes. (Tyson, deep into training, was not available to comment for this story, but he has been openly supportive of Jake in the past, saying in the Netflix doc, “I’m a fan of people that know how to put asses in the seats. … I like to see him talking shit. He’s an antihero. He’s not a villain. He does hero shit, but he just don’t go by heroes’ laws.”) Bidarian, who fully embraces his fighter’s villainous public persona, adds: “People remember his last fight with Jones, sitting on a stool and not getting back up. Imagine, for all those people who want to see Jake Paul get knocked out, if Mike Tyson at 58 comes back and knocks out Jake Paul, he’ll be revered for the rest of his days. He put an end to this YouTuber’s reign.”
And what if the “Problem Child” — Jake’s fighting moniker, which also capitalizes on his bad-boy reputation — comes out on top?
“Now, if Jake does knock out Mike Tyson, sure, there will be a lot of people who are mad,” Bidarian continues. “But there’s also going to be a lot more opportunities for him in the world of boxing.”
Jake is counting on it — and is already looking well past this fight to global boxing domination. His goal is to become a world champion, meaning he’d knock out one of the four top-ranked belt holders in his weight class, cruiserweight. He plans on having that coincide with his girlfriend, Dutch speed skater Jutta Leerdam, 25, winning gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan.
“So in two years, Jutta gets a gold medal and I win the world championship,” Jake tells me, matter-of-factly. “We’d be world champion at the same time.” Beyond that, he wants to own an NFL team — just not his hometown team. “The Browns have a curse — so then I end up drifting to the Chiefs. Travis Kelce, he’s from Cleveland, so I’m a fan,” he says.
World champion. NFL owner. None of this “YouTuber” stuff. Then, finally, no one will call Jake Paul a joke ever again.
Or at least that’s the plan.
To understand how someone like Jake Paul has managed to find himself within striking distance of Mike Tyson’s fists — at least not within the confines of a prank video — you need to go back in time, to childhood, when Jake and Logan, two years his senior, were just rambunctious kids horsing around their home in Westlake, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland.
As teens, the two flaxen-haired boys were naturals at making funny and engaging Vines, the six-second video app that was a precursor to TikTok. In the beginning, they appeared side-by-side in the clips, a sibling comedy duo with a supporting cast of pals. By 2017, when Twitter deactivated Vine, Jake had amassed 5.3 million “Jake Paulers” and 2 billion views. Logan’s following, the “Logang,” ran neck-and-neck with Jake’s. Wherever they took their content — YouTube, Facebook, Instagram — the fans followed.
But the Pauls’ upbeat, slapstick content hid a darkness at home. Their parents, Pam, a nurse, and Greg, a real estate agent — both of whom appear in their videos — divorced when the boys were 7 and 9. It was by all accounts an ugly split. “It was rocky in the beginning — really, really rocky,” says Pam, who has been remarried for 20 years.
“There was mental manipulation and my mom trying to get me on her side, my dad trying to get me on his side,” Jake recalls. “All these games and madness and just psychological craziness.”
It wasn’t until later in life, around his mid-20s, that Jake uncovered through therapy that he had a deep well of unresolved trauma relating to his father. He says his dad physically abused him and his brother from childhood until they left for Los Angeles in their late teens.
“He was punching us, slapping us, throwing us down the stairs, throwing things at us, mental abuse, manipulation,” Jake says.