Good Bad Billionaire: Beyonce

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.3 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2026

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Beyonce started out as a little girl competing in local talent shows, but over the course of a 30-year career in music she transformed herself into a mogul worth $1 billion. Journalist Zing Tsjeng and BBC business editor Simon Jack trace Beyonce’s early years in girl group Girls Tyme, the turbulent rise of Destiny’s Child, and her breakout as a solo artist, before examining the strategic decisions that transformed her from performer to powerful businesswoman and entrepreneur. Beyonce’s rise to billionaire features conflicts with family and friends, brand battles, and questions around feminism, capitalism, and control. Is she a force for empowerment, a ruthless operator, or simply one of the most effective wealth-builders in modern entertainment?

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:07.2	Things just swirling around my head.
0:09.6	Am I really the product of this?
0:12.1	Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests.
0:17.0	Little did I know what more was to come.
0:19.5	I'm Jenny Clemen, and in the new series of The Gift, we'll hear more stories emerging out of the ever-expanding global DNA database.
0:28.8	They did know that I was different.
0:31.7	You had kids together.
0:33.0	Yeah.
0:33.5	Then you met.
0:35.2	Then we met.
0:35.4	The Gift. Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:39.5	Hello, I'm Simon. And I'm Zing. Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
0:44.0	Together, we host Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast that looks at how some of the richest people on the planet made their money.
0:49.9	You can find us every week wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
0:53.0	We've covered some of the biggest names in tech, sport, entertainment and finance,
0:56.9	from Elon Musk to Ronnie Scruvala.
0:59.3	Tyler Perry to Michael O'Leary.
1:01.0	And even Selena Gomez and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
1:03.8	In this episode, we cover one of the newly minted billionaires on the list, Queen Bee herself, Beyonce.
1:10.1	We hope you enjoy listening.
1:15.6	A young girl, just nine years old,
	...

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