At 17 or 18, Davido says, he went from earning nothing to collecting $30,000 or $40,000 a show, and he didn’t spend it well. “When I was young, I was wild. Real wild,” he told Boardroom for the cover of its Fall Issue. “I don’t think I made wise choices then.”
The story went online on October 28, pegged to Oriadé, his sixth album, and the money lines started moving on X this afternoon. Most of the album talk sits in the back half. The part people are clipping is Davido, 15 years after “Dami Duro,” explaining his finances in his own numbers.
In his telling, the correction came from his father, Adedeji Adeleke, who wanted the music used as a tool. “Music is just like how Jay-Z used it,” Davido said. “Use music to get a lot of other things.” The Davido of 2018 talked about money the other way round. “Music is an investment. Anywhere in the world, if you want to blow you have to spend money,” he said in a 2018 interview. Back then the money went into the music. Now he wants the music to pay for everything else.
He lists the everything else freely. Martell, whose billboards have carried his face since 2021, is “the biggest cognac in West Africa,” he says. Davido Music Worldwide now runs DMW Finance, DMW Realty and DMW Tech, plus a foundation. He backs startups on feel and named his model: “Look at Nas. Nas invested in something and never had to do one show in his life.” He also admits he’s “not really a tech guy.”
Spiro, the electric motorbike company, is where he gets specific. “When we joined the company, it was worth like nine million. Now it’s worth $1B,” he said.
The funding record runs differently on both ends. Davido came on board in early 2025, and by then Spiro had already raised more than $180 million from Equitane and Société Générale. That October, a $100 million round led by Afreximbank’s development fund put the company’s value at $350 million, and Davido posted at the time that Spiro was “officially on the road to a $1 billion valuation.” A $215 million round came in June 2026, followed by $55 million from China’s NewTrails Capital, and founder Gagan Gupta said that took Spiro to nearly $1 billion. The company hasn’t published an exact figure.
So the billion is close, on Spiro’s own account. Nine million doesn’t match any number on the record.
The interview doesn’t break the figure down. It could be a slip, or a number for something smaller than the whole company, like his own entry price. We found no word from Spiro on it either.
That matters for how the rest reads, because the biggest figures in the piece come from him alone. He says the family business is “about to start supplying 35% of the electricity to the whole of West Africa” off a power plant in Ajebamidele, Ondo State, that cost “like $2.2 billion.” Some of it has already aged. The story has him “signed to Sony through RCA,” a line he overtook on October 27 when he posted “FREE AGENT” with no new label named.
None of this makes the confession at the top any less real. A teenager with $40,000 a night and no plan is a story half of Lagos could tell about someone. In the same sitting, Davido told young artists that “talent is like 30, 40 percent of the whole job.” He wants to be read as an investor now, and investors get asked to show the math. On Spiro, he hasn’t yet.