Being the mother of a successful rapper comes with some pretty big perks. According to Hot New Hip Hop, Nelly reportedly has a net worth of $70 million dollars in 2024. Which means his mom Rhonda Mack can safely say that she’s financially comfortable these days.
But it hasn’t always been like that for her.
Nelly recently opened up about how challenging things were for his mom before he made it big. She went through some unbelievably difficult moments. Both in her personal life and her professional life. In the season 7 premiere of The Shop, Nelly spoke up about how he got to be so good with money.
Nelly’s Key To Success
And he credited his mother, saying that it was her hard labor that inspired him to hustle and learn how to make, save and invest money. He revealed that his mom was a single parent, who had to work incredibly hard to pay the bills and put food on the table.She reportedly worked in the fast food industry for 35 to 40 years, and Nelly pointed out that anyone who’d worked in a fast food franchise would know how hard that was.
He said that it was constant, and that it could be very taxing. In an interview he had with Access Hollywood, Nelly explained that she’d sometimes need to work two jobs at once even. Nelly remembered a time when he wanted to go to his high school’s homecoming but Rhonda only had $50 dollars to give him for it.
But she offered to get him a job working at a food truck so that he could make some extra cash for himself. He was just fourteen at the time. He told the co-hosts of The Shop that he ended up making $140 dollars by the time Homecoming came around, which was a lot of money to him back then. Nelly later ended up with a job working the grill at a McDonald’s in St. Louis, Missouri and was there all throughout his high school years.
Nelly’s Rise To Fame
Although he wasn’t destined to stay in the food industry, he confessed that it was his mom that give a strong work ethic. Afrotech reported that in 1993, he formed the rap group St. Lunatics with 5 other members and they started to have success. Just over six years later Nelly became a household name when he released his hit album, Country Grammar, which ended up getting to number 1 on the Billboard 200.
And he decided to show his mom his gratitude for her having worked so hard to raise him by doing a grand gesture. In his Access Hollywood interview the rapper talked about how he decided to surprise his mom at her place of work one day. Rhonda was working a shift at Rally’s when her son pulled up to the drive-thru window, wound down the window and told her that she should quit and come with him.
Dream Come True
He said: “the best memory that I had was being able to pull up to her job and tell her she doesn’t have to work there anymore.” He shared that it felt very rewarding to be able to do that for her after everything she’d done for him over the years.
A couple years after her son had risen to stardom, Rhonda sat down with the Baltimore Sun to talk about how much her life had changed since Country Grammar came out. One of the tracks off the album, Luven Me, had a verse that was about her.The proud mother said that one of her favorite lines from it was: ‘You don’t have to work no more.’ She confessed that the song had made her cry when she first heard it.
Nelly’s Early Years
Looking back at her life before Nelly became famous, Rhonda told the outlet that she had to do what she had to do to support him. Throughout Nelly’s entire life, she said that she worked two jobs to support him, sometimes three. She admitted that she couldn’t call him Nelly, she’d gotten used to calling him ‘Man’, because he was the man of the house. According to her, Nelly was a handful as a child, but she didn’t expect him to be any other way.
Rhonda noticed her son’s musical talents when he was little, but she didn’t encourage them as much as she did his sporting abilities. She reportedly had dreams of him being a professional baseball player. But when Nelly quit his job with UPS to pursue his budding rap career, she was supportive.
She said: “I knew he had it in him. He worked hard to get there and he had to make sacrifices to get there.” Rhonda admitted that his success came with a lot of changes, both good and bad. She didn’t appreciate the public attention her family had begun to get, and she especially didn’t appreciate the tabloids that came knocking at her door.
How Nelly’s Mother Gave Back
Ironically, Nelly’s big gesture of showing up at her workplace and having her retire early might not have been exactly what his mother had wanted. Rhonda told the Baltimore Sun that she had plans to go back to work. She’d been working at her son’s 4Sho4Kids foundation, helping disadvantaged youth, but she wanted a regular job again.
She shared that she appreciated everything Nelly had done for her, and that she’d been really blessed. But she was at the point where she felt she was losing her independence. She added that she loved fast food, and that she could stock shelves.Of course this time things would be very different from how they were when Nelly was younger.
Back then she had to work because she had to, because she was a single parent. But what happened to Nelly’s father, Cornell Haynes Sr. ? He reportedly didn’t give his family an easy time when Nelly was growing up.
Contact Music revealed that during an interview on VH1’s Behind The Music, the rapper got candid about what being under his father’s roof was like as a little kid. He claimed that his father led by fear. So, he did what his father said because he was scared of being harmed by him. He shared that Cornell’s voice rang so vividly in his head that it was just a fear for him.
Eventually, his mom asked for a divorce, and Nelly’s parents separated when he was just 7-years-old. Which was how he ended up in St. Louis, Rhonda moved him there so that they could start over. They lost touch with Cornell and he faded from the picture.Nelly’s mom was left to raise him and his half-sister, Jackie Donahue, who Cornell had from a previous relationship and then abandoned with Rhonda, per Contact Music.
Tragedy Strikes Nelly’s Family
Tragedy struck the family in 2001 when Jackie was diagnosed with Leukemia. A report by Today explained that the cancer was in remission for almost 2 years, but she then suffered a relapse and the illness claimed her life in 2005. It’s unclear how close she and Nelly’s mom were, because even though one article claimed that Rhonda helped raise her, most articles talk about her biological mom.
Nicki Swift reported on how Jackie’s mother Sarah Donuhue was with her daughter until her final days. And in an interview on the Tamron Hall Show, Nelly talked about how he adopted her two children after she passed, and credited Sarah for her help raising them. So, it’s difficult to say what kind of relationship Jackie had with his mother, but if she was a big part of her life, it would’ve been a true hardship for Rhonda.
As for Jackie and Nelly’s father, it wasn’t until Nelly was a successful adult that he and Cornell formed some kind of a relationship again. According to Contact Music, Nelly let him back into his life in the early 2010s after he allegedly admitted to him that he messed Nelly up because of bad parenting.
Around that time, Nelly revealed that he was being a way better grandfather to his kids than he ever was as a father to him. But their rekindled relationship didn’t last for too long. And things got sour pretty fast. Nelly’s normally a private person, but he went public with how disappointed he was with his dad in 2018.
Why Nelly Turned His Back
The Daily Mail reported that the rapper turned on Cornell and began posting tweets about him. He wrote: “The word father is a strong word … something I never knew anything about as a child because mine never did what he had to do, only what he wanted.”
Nelly added that he hoped what he did was worth it because he was done with him and he announced that he wasn’t going to give him any more money. He then praised Rhonda by saying that she always had a job, she taught him how to play sports, she came to his games and she saw him graduate.
While nobody could pinpoint exactly what his dad did to upset him that much, there was some speculation that it had something to do with his then ex-girlfriend, Ashanti. Days earlier, his father was seen in a selfie with her that she posted on her Snapchat account while at her concert in St. Louis.
In his Twitter rant, Nelly finished by saying that he was Mama’s boy, and that he loved her.
