'Genius' Mayweather Will Make $180M for One Fight

There's a reason Floyd Mayweather sits atop the Forbes list of highest-paid athletes, and tomorrow night's pay-per-view fight against Manny Pacquiao provides a good example of it. The AP estimates that Mayweather will take home $180 million for one night's work, while Pacquiao's team can expect $120 million. Mayweather, whose history of domestic violence makes endorsements all but impossible, gets the bigger payday in part because of the unprecedented financial enterprise he's set up in which he acts as his own promoter, writes Annie Lowrey at New York. (The piece is headlined "Floyd Mayweather's Financial Genius.")

"In some sense, then, Mayweather looks less like a top-earning athlete than he does like a top-earning touring musician—especially if you think of the pay-per-view watchers as being ticket holders," writes Lowrey. "He stages his own shows and then takes a fat cut of the revenue from those shows." In the Philippines, meanwhile, an official at an electric company is pleading with people to turn off major appliances during the fight so residents will have enough juice to watch native son Pacquiao fight for the welterweight title, reports AP. (More Floyd Mayweather Jr. stories.)