Travis Scott was born Jacques Bermon Webster II on 30 April 1991 in Houston, Texas. He spent his early childhood with his grandmother in South Park, a low-income Houston neighbourhood, before his family relocated to the middle-class suburb of Missouri City; his mother worked for Apple, his father ran his own business and performed soul music, and his grandfather was a jazz composer. He attended Elkins High School, where he took part in musical theatre, and later enrolled at the University of Texas at San Antonio before dropping out during his second year to pursue music full time. His stage name combines “Travis,” after his favourite uncle, with “Scott,” the real first name of rapper Kid Cudi, an artist he idolised, according to Wikipedia.

Webster’s earliest recorded output came through two short-lived duos, The Graduates and The Classmates, both of which had dissolved by late 2012. After a difficult stretch in New York and Los Angeles that included periods of homelessness, his production work caught the attention of rapper T.I., which helped open doors in the industry. He signed with Epic Records and entered a publishing deal with Kanye West’s GOOD Music in 2012, then added a joint recording deal with T.I.’s Grand Hustle imprint in April 2013. His early mixtape “Days Before Rodeo,” first released for free in 2014, was reissued commercially in 2023 and climbed all the way to number one on the Billboard 200 nearly a decade after it first appeared, according to Billboard.

Scott’s proper studio debut, “Rodeo,” arrived on 4 September 2015 and entered the Billboard 200 at number three while topping the Top Rap Albums chart outright, establishing him as a genuine commercial force rather than simply a producer’s protégé. The album’s lead single, “Antidote,” became a slow-building hit that lingered on the Billboard Hot 100 for well over a year and went on to be certified multi-platinum. He followed it with “Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight” in 2016, which became his first number one album on the Billboard 200 and confirmed that “Rodeo” had been no fluke, according to Billboard.

“Astroworld,” released in August 2018 and named after the shuttered Houston theme park Scott grew up near, debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 537,000 equivalent album units, the second-largest opening week of that year behind only Drake’s “Scorpion.” Its centrepiece single, “Sicko Mode,” became his first number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and has since been certified multi-platinum many times over, according to Billboard. He followed that success with “Utopia” in 2023, his fourth consecutive album to open at number one on the Billboard 200, and has amassed ten Grammy Award nominations across his career to date.

Between October 2019 and October 2020, Scott became the first artist in Billboard chart history to notch three separate Hot 100 number one debuts inside a twelve month span, with “Highest in the Room,” “The Scotts” (his collaboration with Kanye West) and “Franchise” all opening at the top of the chart. The run cemented him as one of the defining commercial forces in hip hop and helped drive his crossover into mainstream advertising and popular culture well beyond music, according to Billboard.

Scott’s partnership with Nike began in 2017 and has grown into one of the most commercially successful sneaker collaborations of the past decade, spanning the Air Force 1 and multiple Air Jordan releases under his Cactus Jack branding. In September 2020 he partnered with McDonald’s on the “Travis Scott Meal,” a promotion built around his own childhood order of a Quarter Pounder with bacon, fries and barbecue sauce; Forbes estimated he earned at least 20 million dollars from the four week campaign once merchandise sales tied to the deal were included, according to Forbes.

That same year, his “Astronomical” virtual concert inside Fortnite drew 12.3 million concurrent viewers, a record for an in-game event at the time, with more than 27 million unique players tuning in across five showings, according to Variety. His endorsement portfolio has also included Dior menswear, Audemars Piguet and PlayStation.

Scott founded his own record label, Cactus Jack Records, in 2017, using it to sign and develop artists including Don Toliver, Sheck Wes and SoFaygo under his creative direction. In March 2021 he partnered with Anheuser-Busch to launch Cacti Agave Spiked Seltzer, a canned drink he helped develop personally; the brand sold out almost immediately and posted the highest first-week rate of sale for a variety pack in the brewer’s history, outperforming several established hard seltzer competitors, according to Forbes. He has since expanded into film, signing a production deal with A24 in 2021 and co-directing the experimental concert film “Circus Maximus” in 2023.

In June 2020, Scott paid 23.5 million dollars in cash for a 16,700 square foot mansion in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, a property that had originally been listed for close to 42 million dollars before he negotiated the price down substantially. The seven-bedroom, eleven-bathroom home includes a 20-car underground garage, a 15-seat home theatre and a wine cellar built to hold 650 bottles, according to TMZ. He has also owned a large family home in Houston, though the Brentwood estate remains his best documented major asset.