Business Insider has published a report about how a bunch of very well off artists abused Covid grants. It’s behind a paywall, but there’s a good breakdown on Twitter/X:
Alice in Chains members paid themselves $3.4M from grant the same year they made $48M selling their catalog. Meanwhile, their longtime guitar tech Scott Dachroeden — the exact type of worker this grant was meant to help — had to rely on GoFundMe when he got cancer.
And a summary on Stereogum:
Lil Wayne got a taxpayer-funded $8.9 million grant, and he “spent more than $1.3 million from the grant on private-jet flights and over $460,000 on clothes and accessories, many of them from high-end brands like Gucci and Balenciaga.” Wayne also reportedly used $175,000 of that money on “a music festival promoting his marijuana brand, GKUA” and also used the grant for “flights and luxury hotel rooms for women whose connection to Lil Wayne’s touring operation was unclear, including a waitress at a Hooters-type restaurant and a porn actress.”