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Bad Bunny’s Residency Math: Why Staying in One Place Paid

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17 hours ago

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Every other superstar on earth moves the show to the fans. In the summer of 2025, Bad Bunny ran the equation backwards: he stayed home in Puerto Rico, and half a million people came to him.

The run was called “No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí” — “I Don’t Want to Leave Here” — at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot in San Juan. Announced as a 30-show residency, the stand grew to 31 shows between July and September 2025, and IQ Magazine, reporting figures from the venue, put ticket sales at more than 495,000. Rolling Stone put total attendance at more than half a million people. To understand the demand, consider the starting gun: his team reported that the original 30 shows sold some 400,000 tickets in under four hours.

Now the residency math, which is really a story about costs that disappear. A stadium tour pays its biggest bills over and over — every city means a fresh load-in and load-out, a fleet of trucks, flights for hundreds of crew, new local labor learning a complicated show. A residency pays those bills once. The stage is built once. The crew sleeps in the same beds for weeks. The production gets better instead of just getting moved, because the team refines the same show in the same room night after night. Meanwhile the scarcity that tours manufacture by leaving town is replaced by a different kind: there is exactly one place on earth to see this, and it is not coming to you.

The flip side of that scarcity is that the fans’ travel money lands in one economy instead of thirty. Research firm Gaither International estimated the residency’s total economic impact on Puerto Rico at $733 million, a figure reported widely in coverage of the run, while the tourism board Discover Puerto Rico estimated visitor spending on lodging, food and transport at roughly $200 million. Those are impact estimates, not Bad Bunny’s paycheck — different methods produce different totals, and none of them is his fee. But they explain why a residency of this size becomes a civic event: hotels, airlines, restaurants and the venue all share in a gross that a normal tour spreads across a continent.

Context makes the choice bolder. Bad Bunny was not an artist avoiding the road because the road had failed him. Billboard records credit his 2022 touring year as the highest-grossing calendar year ever for a touring artist at the time — about $435 million across 81 shows. He knew exactly what touring paid. The residency says he also knew what touring cost: the trucks, the turnover, the waste built into doing the same miracle in a different zip code every night. In 2025 the biggest live act in Latin music proved the oldest idea in show business could be the newest one. Build the room. Stay in it. Let the world buy the plane tickets.

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We Speak Financials

Formula 1’s Money Boom in America

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15 hours ago

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October 27, 2026

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A generation ago, Formula 1 treated the United States as a nice place to visit. Today it treats America as the engine room. Three U.S. races, a Las Vegas event the sport promotes itself, and team values that now rival the biggest franchises in American sports tell a story that is less about lap times than about money — and the money is moving fast.

Start with the valuations. In Forbes’ November 2025 ranking of Formula 1’s most valuable teams, Ferrari led the grid at an estimated $6.5 billion, with Mercedes second at $6 billion and McLaren third at $4.4 billion. Across all ten teams, the average valuation reached $3.6 billion — up 89 percent since 2023, according to Forbes — and every single team on the grid was valued at $1.5 billion or more. A cost cap introduced in 2021 turned teams from spending contests into controlled businesses, and investors have priced them accordingly.

Then there is Las Vegas. Formula 1 did something in Vegas it does almost nowhere else: it promoted the race itself, buying land, building a permanent pit facility and collecting the ticket and hospitality revenue directly. The inaugural 2023 race generated an estimated $1.5 billion in total economic impact for the city, according to analysis by Applied Analysis reported by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, including $884 million in visitor spending — with attendees spending about 3.6 times more than the average Las Vegas visitor. The race drew a global television audience reported at 59.3 million.

The audience story backs up the asset story. The inaugural Las Vegas race pulled 1.3 million U.S. viewers on ESPN despite a 1 a.m. Eastern start, and the sport’s American calendar — Austin, Miami and Las Vegas — now gives sponsors three premium weekends on U.S. soil instead of one novelty stop.

Austin’s long-running race and Miami’s event, added in 2022, round out the American trio, giving teams, sponsors and broadcasters a season-long presence in the sport’s largest commercial market rather than a single annual visit.

Put it together and the boom explains itself: capped costs, soaring team values, a self-promoted American flagship race, and sponsors paying record rates to stand next to all of it. Formula 1 did not just find America. It found America’s wallet — and America’s investors found it right back.

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