Beyoncé Covers Forbes Magazine June 2009!

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Inside Beyonce’s Entertainment Empire
Beyonce Knowles is a perfectionist. That’s how she rakes in $87 million a year.
n a crisp Thursday evening in late April a Cadillac Escalade barrels down a cross street in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, coming to a halt before the School of Visual Arts. Four-and-a-half-inch heels emerge, then the rest of Beyoncé Knowles, wearing a crowd-delighting, hip-hugging, black-sequined Balmain dress. Flashbulbs and shrieks explode from a gathering in the hundreds. The 27-year-old singer is there to promote Obsessed, a movie thriller she’s been plugging relentlessly since the beginning of the week. Beyoncé works the crowd for 45 minutes before heading into the theater. With two bodyguards, a publicist and a stylist alongside, she takes questions from the press. Yes, she did get bruised while filming the fight scene. That hoax, where Howard Stern played a distorted version of “If I Were a Boy,” making her sound grotesquely off-key–oh, that was silly.

After the premiere Beyoncé headed to a party at the Bowery Hotel. It had been quite a day. Call time at the Today show was 6 a.m. to rehearse and get made up for a live interview and performance. After that she appears on The View (11 a.m.) before heading over to tape Larry King [not quite] Live, followed by 106 & Park at BET. She has a few hours to herself at a downtown apartment.

In Pictures: How Beyonce Makes Her Millions

That’s the way much of her life has played out for the past 20 years–one reason she has sold upward of 118 million records, won ten Grammys, starred in seven films and headlined three solo tours. This year she will bring in an estimated $87 million from publishing and music sales, touring and other performances, film work, her fashion collection and endorsement deals. That diversified portfolio helps her land at number 4 on the FORBES Celebrity 100 list, a ranking based on income and visibility. Beyoncé constantly works and reworks her act, watching every two-hour performance on tour–even after her hundredth appearance–taking notes on how to improve. “I’m never satisfied,” she says, adding with a nervous laugh, “I’m sure sometimes it’s not easy working for me.” Then, seriously: “I’ve never met anyone that works harder than me in my industry.”

Such diligence invites comparison with another 27-year-old at the top of the charts. Britney Spears is a study in contrast. After peaking early she has demonstrated a spectacular capacity for melting down. (Spears, number 13 on our list, is back on tour–and reportedly on medication.) “I’ve worked too hard and sacrificed too much to do something silly that would mess up the brand I’ve created all of these years,” says Beyoncé. To say nothing of the jobs of the roughly 400 people who work for her or her enterprises.

Beyoncé grew up in a four-bedroom home in Houston’s upscale third ward with her father, Mathew, a salesman at Xerox (later at Johnson & Johnson); mother, Tina, a hair salon owner; and younger sister, Solange, now a singer. A dance teacher spotted Beyoncé and encouraged the shy first-grader to enroll in her school’s talent show–the first of three dozen competitions she won over the next few years. At age 9 Beyoncé joined and devoted every spare minute to an R&B group called Girlz Tyme, which didn’t produce an album but did make it to Star Search.

Soon after, her father quit his day job to take over the group, imposing a boot camp regimen, cutting members and changing its name to Destiny’s Child. Under his authority the band rehearsed for hours every day, working with a media coach, a choreographer and a voice teacher who lived for a time in an apartment over their garage. Knowles jogged with the girls as they sang, an exercise to build stamina, and booked them anywhere he could. “There was nothing too small or too large,” he recalls–church services, grocery store openings, fashion shows, Six Flags. When it wasn’t performing, the group was practicing. Unrelentingly. “Repetition, repetition,” says her dad. “Beyoncé has always had such passion about music that she never complained about doing it again.”

She still doesn’t, judging by the number of takes she endured on a set at the Silvercup Studios in Long Island City, N.Y. It was 10 a.m. the Friday before her premiere, and Beyoncé had already spent an hour-plus at a morning workout with her personal trainer. She gave over much of the day to produce public service announcements and ad spots for the Feeding America campaign, an effort with General Mills. Beyoncé has spent considerable time (and money) on charities–she and her family created the Survivor Foundation to provide temporary housing to Hurricane Katrina and other disaster victims; she donated her acting salary from playing the once-drug-addicted blues singer Etta James in Cadillac Records (2008) to Phoenix House. This six-hour ordeal of radio and TV spots plus a print ad wasn’t totally selfless: General Mills is sponsoring the U.S. leg of her I Am tour this summer. Concertgoers will be able to donate nonperishable goods.

While she huddled with General Mills staffers working through the talking points, Beyoncé’s retinue danced around her, making sure her caramel skin was painted just right, her tresses blown yardstick straight. She did take after take, working through the feigned emotions–concern, surprise, urgency–until the food company sponsors, looking wilted, were satisfied. Was she willing to record a “personal” video message on the campaign for the General Mills sales meeting? Sure. Take photos with the staff? Of course. After that Beyoncé put herself through two hours of a cover shoot, plus an interview, for a magazine. Then she was off for an evening playing Uno with her 4-year-old nephew Julez.

Beyoncé caught her break in 1997, when Destiny’s Child signed with Columbia Records (still her label). Its first song, “Killing Time,” was on the soundtrack for Men in Black. But within the group, trouble bubbled. Band members LaTavia Roberson and LeToya Luckett fired Mathew Knowles as their manager and claimed in a lawsuit that he owed them money and favored his lead vocalist (Beyoncé), accusations that spawned nasty headlines. Knowles still denies the claim, but the case was settled out of court. The notoriety may have helped pump sales for the group’s second album, The Writing’s on the Wall, which sold 8 million or so copies. Despite continued infighting–Destiny’s Child was soon down to a trio–the band kept churning out albums and became the top-selling female recording group of all time.

Beyoncé found her own voice in 2003. Her solo debut, Dangerously in Love, sold 4 million copies and took five Grammys. Soon after her second album, B’Day (2006), she was off on a 30-country tour. But it’s her latest solo effort, the double-disc I Am … Sasha Fierce (2008), that shows off Beyoncé’s range and stick-to-itiveness. With 17 songs on the deluxe album, winnowed from the 70-plus recorded, the collection took a year to compile, combining two distinct styles of music (introspective R&B ballads and club-ready dance tracks). Beyoncé had a hand in writing and producing nearly every cut. At a time when album sales have dropped 45% since the peak in 2000, I Am … Sasha Fierce has sold 4 million copies worldwide. Thanks to her popularity and clout, Beyoncé splits the profits with Columbia, a deal reserved for A-list performers. “We’re about 40 hits in, and she’s [just] 27 years old,” says Rob Stringer, president of Columbia/Epic Label Group.

Sasha Fierce is Beyoncé ‘s alter ego on stage, a persona she has characterized as “the fun, more sensual, more aggressive, more outspoken … and glamorous side.” Her doppelgänger satisfies an obvious need to ham it up–the same impulse that landed her parts in movies, including her 2006 role as Deena Jones, a character loosely based on Diana Ross, in Dreamgirls. (“It’s very rare to find [good] musicians who are also good actors,” says Christopher Silbermann, president of ICM, the talent agency that represents her.)

Just as obviously, Sasha Fierce provides cover for someone obsessively protective of her private life. “Just because you’re a celebrity, [people] feel like they have to know everything about you,” Beyoncé pouts–and tenses up. “I disagree.” Example? While she’s been photographed with Jay-Z for nearly a decade, she declined publicly to acknowledge their romantic involvement–and marriage last year–until recently. (Her camp insisted the rap star not be interviewed for this story.) Nor does she appear comfortable talking about the strain her career has had on her family. (Mathew’s decision years ago to manage Destiny’s Child caused emotional and financial havoc–including a brief separation from his wife–that forced the sale of their Houston home.)

Surprisingly, perhaps, Beyoncé is still a bit insecure about her talents. At times she sounds like the ruffled girl on Star Search. “Like everyone else, you work really hard and you want it to be great; you want your friends to like it,” she muses. “What makes me feel comfortable is practice and knowing I’m prepared. But I still, of course, get nervous.”

You wouldn’t know that from the other side of the tripod, as Beyoncé began her week modeling her own fashion lines, Deréon and House of Deréon, at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. Out of this session will come ads to present the fall collections. Over ten hours Beyoncé was in and out of dresses, showcasing different sportswear, footwear, handbags, jewelry and eyewear.

On Tuesday she arrived at a soundstage in Brooklyn to shoot a music video for “Sweet Dreams,” a single from her latest album. The choreography she’d picked up weeks ago in L.A. she had to now relearn with a different group. The session lasted from 10 a.m. until 2 a.m. the next morning.

Eight hours later, hair and makeup ready, Beyoncé taped the first of three dozen television and radio interviews around Manhattan to boost Obsessed. While her first nonsinging role required less screen time than her costars Idris Elba and Ali Larter had, Beyoncé has done a disproportionate amount of time flogging the movie. (It bombed critically, though the film has already brought in $65 million.)

Two days later she was off to Zagreb, Croatia to kick off the 110-date I Am tour. It was a long-sought opportunity to focus on just one thing: her singing.