Streamer Adin Ross clutches Drake’s shoulder in giddy anguish. They’ve just lost $100,000 on Nine to Five, an online slot machine themed after office workers trapped in the rat race, with little cartoon icons of men with glasses and grime-stained typewriters. And they’re about to do it again another seven times. “It’s like a hit,” Ross cries excitedly, encouraging Drake to bet even more. Within 45 seconds, they lose enough money to buy an NYC penthouse. But it’s just a drop in the bucket for Drake, who spends the entire Kick stream—itself a glorified ad for Stake, the crypto-based online casino they played on—talking about gambling. He puts up $100k on a weightlifting competition with Ross; he shouts out the UFC champion who recently scored him almost a million; he ponders the idea of betting on Ross’ sports league Brand Risk. They have the gall to offer motivational speeches in the middle and end, some virtuous window dressing to an otherwise unsavory two and a half hours of gambling. “Clearly, it’s not about winning, it’s about being around the people you love,” Drake grins in the final minutes.
Maybe after a decade and a half of ruling the charts, the only thing that offers Aubrey Graham an escape from anhedonia is the fleeting euphoria of a lottery hit. When you have enough money to get anything you could possibly want, the only thing left is the unattainable—the dopamine that consumerist goods alone can’t provide, the primordial himbo high of “money go way up” in a climactic instant. But even now you can see on his face that the thrill is gone, it doesn’t feel the same as it once did. He’s going through the motions, fulfilling a brand promo.
Drake reportedly signed a $100 million/year endorsement deal with Stake, and he’s promoting the company more feverishly than his own music. His Instagram grid looks like he was hacked by a Bitcoin scammer who spammed fake testimonials. Watching their session the other night, where Drake prattled on about gambling calls as if they radiated a mythical force while Ross played the role of obsequious glazer, it felt like a rock bottom moment for the new era of streamer-musician collaborations. Drake has steadily moved along the streamer axis, from shouting out more positive role models like Kai Cenat to wasting hours gambling with xQc and Ross, who palled around with Andrew Tate and went full sycophant for Donald Trump.
The Curaçao-based Stake’s comeup in the last few years has been legally murky. It’s banned in the US, so the founders created a sister site where people in the country can play without using real money. But there aren’t many guardrails to prevent US residents from using VPNs. It’s already facing lawsuits from US plaintiffs who say they’re running an illegal casino, as well as people accusing the company of exploiting their gambling addictions. Stake is at the forefront of a swarm of new betting platforms, from sports gambling sites like FanDuel to “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket, which let you bet on everything from tariffs to Eurovision winners. The company’s revenues reportedly reached $4.7 billion in 2024. Drake becoming Stake’s cultural mascot is insidious—he’s marketing the app to millions of aspirational obsessives, turning his fanbase into a horde of gambling degenerates who trust their favorite influencers’ baseless “calls” with divine faith. It’s astrology for boys nursed on Barstool. It’s even darker because Stake likely gives Drake credit to use for promotions, so there are no stakes to him going berserk with bets. He always wins.
The mainstream lust for gambling feels especially poignant in this Trumpian moment, where falsehoods become fact if you will it hard enough and you become a winner if you repeat loudly enough that you are one. We’re awash with so many get-rich-quick fantasies, from AI-generated shortform slop to shitcoin rug-pulls to endless prediction markets. It speaks to how unstable and slippery money feels now, or at least how corporations want you to feel it is—that anyone can make a million in an afternoon as long as you hit the right buttons. You want to believe you’re lucky, that you can brute force your way into getting a jackpot because you feel “W vibes” in the air, that you’re the chosen one endowed with a god-bestowed gift. It’s a kind of magical thinking promoted by the uber-rich, who gamble because they have way too much money, and often bought into by the poor, who desperately dream of succeeding but end up swindled. The infestation of this sort of attitude in music isn’t a surprise, it fits right in alongside the way label execs bet on untested artists who get one song with mammoth numbers on TikTok. It’s all deliriously insubstantial.
Drake started doing gambling streams back in 2022; he once apparently lost $20 million on roulette. Last November, he did an especially insipid livestream with xQc, where he burned $1 million in a couple of hours and complained after the Weeknd and Steve Lacy came on the speakers. His stream with Ross tried to be cooler than that—he plays hopecore music and a 454 song; he shouts out PlaqueBoyMax and crowns Ross with a glittering chain. But underneath all the friendly hi-jinks and props, this is a cut-and-dry ad with a dual purpose: to make Drake richer and provide some image recovery after his catastrophic beef with Kendrick. Little flashes of insecurity still shine through, like when he made everyone cut the music after Ross said he thought he could beat Drake in a fight; he tried to make Ross recant it immediately.
There’s something like a musical manosphere nowadays, fanbases full of terminally online acolytes who worship artists with varying histories of grifting and misogyny. In the rap mainstream, the options for young fans can be pretty grim. There’s the rage-or-death crew—the Travis Scotts and Opium moshpit pyros; the Kanye West Nazi cult; the Stake merchants like Drake, who’ll only tease info about new albums if it’s sandwiched between hours of gambling that lines his pockets. It’s hard not to feel like the ghouls are taking over as musicians pander to soulless corporations, creators, anyone who gets them in the eyes and ears of teens. Watching the live chat’s deluge of bigoted jokes, a waterfall of noxious brainrot, made it clear there are some people you don’t want to court. Drake’s too concerned with clutching onto the zeitgeist to self-reflect, but going full-throttle into this world is only a downward spiral.
