LeBron James, Maverick Carter, Rich Paul and Randy Mims are intertwined, all helping James on his path to becoming a billionaire. Of course, as noted, it's not a typo — James is obviously helping himself as much they are him.
In fact, Beats by Dre, Space Jam 2 and Liverpool FC are all things LeBron made millions on. Still nobody would have been possible without these 3 key men.
One man sold jerseys for a living until he was 23, another used his business savvy ways to get LeBron massive contracts and the last one orchestrated Bron’s biggest charitable donation. These men make-up LBJ’s inner circle: Rich Paul, Randy Mims, and Maverick Carter.
NBA fans are certainly familiar with Rich Paul. After all, the NCAA made (and rescinded) a rule unofficially named after the man. Not to mention he founded Klutch Sports, an agency that represents multiple high profile NBA players.
He’s a big deal. Maybe the most important non-player/owner in the NBA today. Athletes want to be his clients, owners fear him as if he’s about to behead them, and he essentially always gets what he, as well as LeBron James, wants.
But what about Mims and Maverick Carter? How did LeBron James take two high school buddies and a dude he met selling jerseys in a parking create an empire that would dominate the NBA?
Let’s start off with the most mysterious member of the Four Horsemen; Randy Mims.
Randy Mims is far more lowkey than any of his business partners. While you can spend the entire day reading up on any of the other three members of LRMR Marketing, Mims doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. A quick Google search brings back little to no info.
So what do we know about Randy?
Randy Mims has known LeBron since the two were barely walking. They grew up together in Akron, and formed an unbreakable bond while living in the projects.
When LeBron left to the NBA straight out of high school, Mims got a marketing degree and began working for AT&T. However, as we know now, he wouldn’t be designing cell phone plans for long. The King soon brought him on as his personal assistant and manager, and eventually he became a player liaison for the Cavaliers.
Now, per The Athletic, Randy is a member of the Lakers front office. Where LeBron goes, Randy is not far behind. Moral of the story? Next time you go to the cell phone store and you want to give the dude a hard time because a plastic cover costs 30 bucks, just know the guy behind the counter might one day be in the Lakers front office…or something.
Maverick Carter is one of the most business savvy members of the group. Like Randy, he has known James since the two were youngsters. In fact, they played ball together in high school. Carter played guard for SVSM, but was nowhere near the player LeBron was – which, you know, hot-take: applies to 99.9 percent of the entire human species.
After a year of college ball at Western Michigan, Carter put his business intellect to work. One of his most genius strokes came when LeBron was participating in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
Carter convinced Jimmy Iovine to give him 15 pairs of the still unreleased “Beats By Dre” headphones. After some cajoling, he received the precious cargo, and immediately unloaded them on LeBron before he got on his flight to China. Maverick Carter instructed LeBron James to give one to each of his teammates.
When the flight landed, every NBA star on the team exited with sleek looking headphones never before seen by the public. The market ate it up.
After all, there’s a long history of trendsetters setting trends and there’s few groups out there in the world who successfully set them more than legitimate NBA superstars. Even when the headphones were bashed for subpar sound quality and high prices, they became a hot commodity. Because the top athletes in the world rocked Beats, consumers were willing to drop a few hundred dollars to look like their role models. It would be like buying a broken television set just because Mike Tyson punched it..
This is just one example of Carter’s marketing genius. He has engineered James’ commercial deals and documentaries. He negotiated the deal that landed The King partial ownership of Liverpool F.C., which won the UEFA Champions League in 2019. Thanks to Maverick Carter, LeBron James only continues to accumulate wealth and fame.
This leaves the last member of the Horsemen, and he is arguably the most famous (aside for LeBron James, of course). Rich Paul is one of the biggest agents in the NBA, and the story of how he reached this level of success is wild.
As you probably know, Paul did not attend college. He was forced to fend for himself after the death of his father in 1999. To make money, he would import jerseys from Atlanta and sell them out of the trunk of his car in Cleveland.
One day, LeBron wandered upon Rich Paul in a parking lot, and a jersey caught his eye. The two struck up a conversation, and hit it off after Paul sold James a Magic Johnson jersey.
After Bron was drafted, he extended an official invite to Paul to join his inner circle, and with that, Rich Paul was on his way to fame and fortune.
Within ten years, Rich Paul owned his own agency. Within 15, he was representing names like Anthony Davis and Draymond Green. Over the course of LeBron’s career, Paul went from pitching jerseys on the street to pitching NBA teams to sign the men whose names were on those jerseys.
All of these men went from growing up in poverty to making enough money to provide for generations to come. Using shrewd marketing moves and a key inside source, three boys from Cleveland became business tycoons.
So, Phil Jackson, about those posse remarks, while you’re out here dating someone powerful while looking in at the NBA from the outside, this crew you dismissed is all but running the entire show. How. About. That.
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