Billy Blanks is an American fitness teacher, martial artist, and fitness expert. He made the Tae Bo exercise and acted in movies like “The Last Boy Scout” and “Expect No Mercy.”
He has this much money because he made the Tae Bo training. Find out how this artist with many skills got into the fitness business and Hollywood and became a rich public figure.
Billy Blanks Jr’s Early Life & Education
Billy Blanks Jr. was born in 1979 to exercise expert Billy Blanks and his wife, Gayle H. Godfrey. At first, they met at a boxing class. He grew up in Los Angeles with Gayle’s daughter Shellie, who also started a successful exercise business.
The Blank family is often called the “first family of fitness.” Billy Blanks Jr. loved to dance when he was a young boy. Even though he helped his father run exercise classes, he was happiest when he was dancing like Michael Jackson when the classes were over.
Paula Abdul is said to have been his mentor. During this time, Blanks Jr. also learned that many people couldn’t handle his father’s lessons. This gave him the idea for the first “Dance it Out” event.
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How Much Does Billy Blanks Make and How Much Is His Net Worth?
As an American exercise guru, martial artist, and actor, Billy Blanks has a net worth of $20 million. Blanks is best known for starting the Tae Bo exercise program, which has become a major fitness trend in the United States.
In its first year on the market, Tae Bo made $80 million and sold more than 1.5 million VHS tapes. So far, Tae Bo has made a lot more than $150 million.
Commercial Real Estate
Blanks was able to make money off of his reputation in Tae Kwon Do by putting his money into real estate. In 2001, Blanks signed papers to sell his house in Hidden Hills, California. The house sold for $7,300,000 to a buyer who did not want to be named.
Blanks and his then-wife bought something together on January 31, 2000, for only $1,400,000. Blanks finally finished his huge house to his satisfaction. At first, he tried to sell it for $11.5 million, but in the end, he took $7,300,000 for it.
Career Highlights
Blanks’s first part in a movie was in ‘Low Blow,’ which was his first break in Hollywood. He was hired as Catherine Bach’s bodyguard when she was making the movie Driving Force in Manila and there was a political problem.
Blanks was also given a small part in the movie. He went on to work in several martial arts movies, like “King of the Kickboxers” and “Bloodfists.” Blanks showed up at the beginning of “The Last Boy Scout” as a football player who was going to die.
In the 1997 movie “Kiss the Girls,” which starred Ashley Judd, Blanks played a kickboxing teacher. In the late 1980s, when he was renting out a karate school in Quincy, Massachusetts, he started working on the Tae Bo program.
He added his own things to his training in martial arts. He put karate and boxing together to make Tae Bo. He also opened a gym in Los Angeles to teach his Tae Bo training at the same time.
He got famous people like Paula Abdul to work out with him, and soon the workout became a part of pop culture.
He started putting out vids that got a lot of attention and sold more than 1.5 million VHS tapes. It sold records for between $80 million and $120 million. Since he is an Evangelist, he uses his faith to encourage people to lose weight and get in shape.
He made a line of workouts called “Believers” for religious people who pray every day. He added Christian ideas and prayers to the regime, which were broadcast on the TBN Christian Network.
Blanks has been given the title of Amateur Athletic Union Champion five times since 1975. He has also won 36 gold medals at different karate tournaments and has won seven karate championships.
In 1982, he was inducted into the Karate Hall of Fame, and two years later, he won the Massachusetts Golden Gloves light-heavyweight title.
Billy and his wife eventually realized that they couldn’t keep living the way they were. Their main source of money was teaching fitness classes, but it wasn’t enough to pay the bills. Even though Billy had done well in the past, he was in bad shape by 2011.
After he was on the popular reality TV show “Shark’s Tank,” his luck changed for good. Billy talked about his plan for a new exercise show called “Dance it Out.” This was basically a new way to do the workouts Blanks Jr. had tried to get people to do in the past.
The main goal of “Dance it Out” was to make exercise more fun and available to more people. This goal came about because of the work Billy did with his father. Blanks Jr. learned over time that many people couldn’t handle his father’s workout routine.
Even Oprah Winfrey was heard saying that it was too hard. “Shark’s Tank” was Billy’s big chance to get ahead, but he turned down an offer from the sharks, which was a very surprising move.
He said that he didn’t think the deal was a good business move, and then he left. This could have been the end of his trip if Daymond John hadn’t found him after the cameras stopped rolling and talked him out of it.
His “Dance it Out” DVD came out for the first time in 2013. Since then, the DVD has become quite famous in both the U.S. and Japan. Even though “Dance it Out” was a hit, or maybe because of it, Billy Blanks Jr. and his father are said to have grown apart after it came out.
Some people think this is because the two guys have very different ideas about how fitness should be done. While Blanks Sr. worked on martial arts and hard workouts, his son worked on dance-based practices that were fun and lighthearted.
In 2017, Billy took over as the artistic director of Norwalk, Connecticut’s Wall Street Theater. He is also active in the theater community in Fairfield County. He helps a non-profit group called Curtain Call put on dance lessons.
Personal Life
In 1974, Blanks married Gayle H. Godfrey. He met her in karate class. Sheila Blanks Cimarosti was Gayle’s daughter from a previous relationship. Soon after, Blanks took her in as his own. She was in the Tae Bo movies Blanks made.
Sheila started her own line of videos called Tae Bo Postnatal Power and also featured her father’s infomercial called T3: Total Transformation Training. Billy Blanks Jr., Blanks’s son, is a fitness teacher. He also made several workout DVDs that sold very well.
Fat Burning Hip Hop Mix and Cardioke are two of Billy Blanks Jr.’s most well-known workouts. Blanks Jr. has also been in musicals like “Fame” and danced with well-known singers like Quincy Jones, Paula Abdul, and Madonna.
After 33 years of marriage, Blanks and Godfrey got a divorce because they had different ideas. In 2008, Blanks and Tomoko Sato, who was his Japanese translator, had another daughter named Angelika. In 2009, he got married to Sato and moved to Japan the same year.
