Porter Weston Robinson was born on July 15, 1992, in Atlanta, Georgia, the second of four sons; his brothers are Nick, Mark and Robert. According to his Wikipedia biography, his family later settled in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where both of his parents had attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Robinson was accepted to the same university but chose not to enroll, opting instead to pursue his emerging music career full time. His brother Mark’s recovery from cancer later inspired Robinson’s philanthropic work, including the Robinson Malawi Fund he established in 2019.

Self-taught from around age 12, Robinson released his earliest material under the alias Ekowraith through the small label YAWA Recordings between 2005 and 2010, teaching himself production through online forums and trial and error. His breakthrough came with the 2010 single “Say My Name,” which reached number one on Beatport and turned him, while still a high-school senior in Chapel Hill, into an in-demand touring act fielding gig requests from across the country. At 18 he signed to Skrillex’s label OWSLA, and his 2011 EP Spitfire became the label’s first release, topping the iTunes dance chart and reportedly crashing Beatport’s servers on release day. The follow-up single “Language” also topped both the Beatport and iTunes dance charts, and his 2013 collaboration with Mat Zo, “Easy,” spent two weeks at number one on Beatport. Robinson’s early rise was recognized by DJ Mag’s Top 100 DJs poll, where he debuted at No. 96 in 2011 and climbed to a career-best No. 40 in 2012.

Robinson’s 2014 debut studio album, Worlds, released on Astralwerks, marked a deliberate break from the bass-fueled big-room sound that made his name, folding in synth-pop songwriting and complextro production instead; it debuted at number one on Billboard’s Dance/Electronic Albums chart and led to headlining festival slots at Ultra, Electric Daisy Carnival and Coachella. He also co-wrote Zedd’s 2012 hit “Clarity,” originally developed under the working title “Poseidon” before Zedd finished it separately, and in 2016 released “Shelter,” a collaboration with fellow producer Madeon that led to a widely praised joint tour and an accompanying anime short produced by A-1 Pictures.

In 2017, Robinson launched Virtual Self, a harder-edged alter ego built around neotrance, hardcore and jungle influences; the project’s single “Ghost Voices” earned him his first Grammy nomination, for Best Dance Recording, at the 2019 ceremony, competing against tracks from Above & Beyond, Disclosure, Fisher and Silk City with Dua Lipa, as Robinson discussed in a Billboard interview at the time. His second album as Porter Robinson, Nurture (2021), again topped Billboard’s Dance/Electronic Albums chart and reached number 52 on the all-genre Billboard 200, and was named to The Fader’s list of the year’s best albums. A third studio album, Smile! :D, followed on July 26, 2024, through Mom + Pop Music, earning a Metacritic score of 75 and supporting a world tour of more than 70 shows across 20 countries and four continents that ran from August 2024 into mid-2025.

Unlike touring-fee-driven mainstream DJs such as Marshmello, the Chainsmokers or Calvin Harris, Robinson has never appeared on Forbes’ “World’s Highest-Paid DJs” list, and no trade outlet — Billboard, DJ Mag or Pollstar included — has published an audited annual income total for him. What exists instead are individual box-office data points reported around the Smile! 😀 tour: a Pollstar News report on the tour’s announcement notes that a sold-out show at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California, on November 25, 2023, grossed $990,360, and a show at Washington, D.C.’s Echostage grossed $160,000. Those are single-date grosses rather than a full-tour or annual total, and no publisher has aggregated Robinson’s complete touring gross into one sourced number.

That absence of a Forbes or Pollstar Boxoffice career total is itself informative: it places Robinson in a tier below the handful of DJs whose festival and residency fees regularly clear eight figures a year, consistent with an album-and-catalogue-driven career built more on royalties, sync licensing and moderately sized headline shows than on the arena and Vegas-residency circuit that tops the trade-press earnings charts.

Robinson’s recording history runs through three different label relationships: Skrillex’s OWSLA released his 2011 breakout EP Spitfire, his debut album Worlds came out on Astralwerks in 2014, and both Nurture (2021) and Smile! 😀 (2024) were released through the independent label Mom + Pop Music. As is standard across the recorded-music industry, none of these deals’ financial terms — advances, royalty splits or catalogue ownership — have been publicly disclosed.

For live bookings, agencies including AAE Speakers Bureau, Anthem Talent Agency and SpeakerBookingAgency list Robinson as available for private and corporate events, with SpeakerBookingAgency quoting an estimated starting fee of $200,000 and above for a live appearance — a third-party aggregator estimate rather than a confirmed guarantee. No verified festival headline fee for stops such as Ultra, Electric Daisy Carnival or Coachella, and no disclosed touring guarantee for the Smile! 😀 world tour, has been published by a credible outlet, so none is estimated here.

A search of music trade press, marketing announcements and entertainment coverage turned up no conventional brand endorsement or sponsorship deal for Robinson — nothing resembling the apparel, footwear or spirits partnerships some touring DJs have signed. His commercial activity outside music appears limited to merchandise sold through his own official webstore in connection with his tours and the Second Sky festival brand, which is direct-to-fan retail rather than a third-party endorsement.

Robinson’s clearest business venture is Second Sky, the festival he curates himself, first staged on June 16, 2019, at Middle Harbor Shoreline Park in Oakland, California, in partnership with promoter Goldenvoice (it briefly carried the name Multiverse Music Festival before being renamed within days of its announcement). Second Sky ran again as a virtual event called “Secret Sky” in May 2020 during pandemic shutdowns, then returned in person in 2021 and 2022; no edition has been staged since 2022, with Robinson’s Smile! 😀 world tour commitments occupying 2024 and 2025.

Beyond Second Sky, Robinson maintains two side-project aliases with commercial footprints of their own: Virtual Self, the trance-and-hardcore project that supported its own UTOPiA SySTEM Tour in 2018, and Air2Earth, a tranquil progressive-house and disco project unveiled in September 2021 that debuted at that year’s Second Sky. No equity stakes, outside investments or other business holdings for Robinson turned up in credible reporting, so none are listed here beyond these music-focused ventures.

Robinson currently resides in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the town where he grew up, according to his Wikipedia biography and multiple interviews. No property purchase, sale or specific address tied to Robinson has been documented in real estate trade press or public-records searches, and no other high-value personal assets — vehicles, aircraft or otherwise — have been reliably reported. None are estimated here in the absence of verifiable source material.