Beyoncé

Destiny's Child was still a going concern when Beyoncé started testing the solo waters. She featured on Jay-Z's 2002 track "'03 Bonnie & Clyde," then released 'Crazy in Love' the following spring. The song topped charts in the US and UK and won two Grammys. Dangerously in Love debuted at No. 1. When Destiny's Child officially disbanded in 2006, it felt like paperwork. Every studio album she's released since has debuted at No. 1.

She holds 35 Grammy wins and 99 nominations, more than any other artist in the award's history. Renaissance (2022), her tribute to Black queer club culture, swept every major critics' year-end list. Cowboy Carter (2024) moved into country and won Album of the Year at the 2025 Grammys, making her the first Black artist to win Best Country Album. The Cowboy Carter Tour was Pollstar's highest-grossing of 2025, and by year's end she'd crossed into billionaire territory. The music, the tours, and the business all run through Parkwood, the company she founded in 2008 and has never shared.

She's said she created the Sasha Fierce alter ego because performing under her own name made her anxious, then retired the persona once she felt she'd grown into it. The separation was real enough that the 2008 album I Am... Sasha Fierce split the two identities onto separate discs. Her whiskey brand, SirDavis, is named after great-grandfather Davis Hogue, a Texas moonshiner. The most meticulous control freak in pop music turns out to have a bootlegger in the family.