Apple buys Beats for $3.2bil -- Dre officially a billionaire

In true Silicon Valley fashion, Lee started out in his family's basement: taste-testing different varieties of copper wire until he found a type that he thought enhanced audio quality. Then, also in Silicon Valley fashion, he marketed the shit out of it and jacked up its price: Monster Cable. Before it was ever mentioned in the same gasp as Dre, Monster was trying to get music lovers to buy into a superior sound that existed mostly in imaginations and marketing brochures. "We came up with a reinvention of what a speaker cable could be," Noel Lee boasts. His son, Kevin, describes it differently: "a cure for no disease."

Young Lee faced financial and familial self-destruction if he couldn't seal the deal. So he sealed whatever he could—what he says was "the most complicated contract [Interscope] had ever seen." And he faced it by himself, with his BA, against a phalanx of corporate lawyers who wake each day to do nothing but negotiate contracts that favor Interscope.

Monster bristles at the suggestion that Beats had everything, even anything to do with engineering: "Absolutely not, they don't have any engineers," says Noel. Kevin piles on: "Beats [had] zero [engineering role]," a reality of the deal he says is "undisputed—Monster engineered the sound in Beats by Dre headphones. They told us what they wanted and they approved it, but we made that sound possible."

Monster received some money as part of the breakup—more severance payment than cash-out—and Beats walked away with everything: all of Monster's audio work, every single patent, the trademarked design, and more than anything else, the name.