Sean Combs was born Sean John Combs on November 4, 1969, in Harlem. His father was murdered in 1974, and his mother raised him in Mt. Vernon, New York. He went to a Catholic boys school in the Bronx and picked up the nickname Puffy in high school, for the way he puffed out his chest to look bigger.
Howard and Uptown
At Howard University he studied business administration, threw weekly dance parties and ran an airport shuttle service between classes. Then he dropped out for an internship at Uptown Records. The internship led to a talent director job, and Combs climbed quickly to vice president, producing several of the label’s key artists. He left in the early 1990s.
Building Bad Boy
In 1993 he started Bad Boy Entertainment. Its client list ran from rising acts to established names: Mariah Carey, New Edition, Method Man, Babyface, TLC, Boyz II Men, Lil’ Kim, SWV, Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige, Faith Evans and Biggie Smalls. ASCAP named him Songwriter of the Year in 1996. By 1997 the company had sold nearly $100 million in recordings and signed a multimillion-dollar deal with Arista Records to manage the label.
Then Biggie was murdered. Combs answered with “I’ll Be Missing You,” a tribute that stayed on top of the Billboard Hot 100 for 11 weeks. It pulled his first album, No Way Out (1997), to platinum status. Nielsen SoundScan ranked the album third among 1997’s best-selling LPs, with more than 3.4 million copies sold in the United States. Both the single and the album won Grammys the next year, for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group and Best Rap Album.
More records followed: Forever in 1999 and The Saga Continues… in 2001. In 2004 he teamed with Nelly and Murphy Lee on “Shake Ya Tailfeather” from the Bad Boys II soundtrack, and the trio took a Grammy for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. Press Play (2006) gave a fading label new life, with Brandy, Mary J. Blige and Timbaland on board. The group Diddy-Dirty Money released Last Train to Paris in 2010. In September 2023 came The Love Album: Off the Grid, his first solo record in 17 years, which earned a 2024 Grammy nomination for Best Progressive R&B Album.
Beyond the studio
Music was never the only business. Combs founded the Sean John clothing line in 1998 and bought the hip-hop label Enyce from Liz Claiborne in 2008 for $20 million. He sold Sean John in 2016 and bought it back in 2022. He began executive producing reality television in 2002 with MTV’s Making the Band, launched the music cable network Revolt in 2013, and signed a 2007 deal with Diageo, owner of Cîroc vodka.
The legal fall
The run turned in November 2023, when a flurry of civil lawsuits accused him of sexual assault and abuse. He stepped down as Revolt’s chairman that month and has denied any wrongdoing. In July 2025 a jury convicted him of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution and acquitted him of racketeering conspiracy and two sex trafficking counts. On October 3, 2025, Judge Arun Subramanian sentenced him to 50 months in prison, fined him $500,000 and ordered five years of supervised release.
