In 2020, Congress passed a bill called the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, and Donald Trump signed it into law. The massive grant was intended to subsidize musicians and venues who were suffering from COVID-related shutdowns, but it also made funds available to a few extremely successful musicians. Today, Business Insider has published an exposé about the ways that already-successful musicians like Lil Wayne, Chris Brown, and Alice In Chains abused those grants, using them to rake in millions and then spending that money in lavish ways.

According to Business Insider, 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.”

The article further accuses Lil Wayne of taking $88,000 in taxpayer money for a concert in Coachella, California that he no-showed. When Business Insider reached him via text, Wayne responded with “a sexually explicit overture to a reporter and did not respond to questions.”

According to Business Insider clients of the managing firm NKSFB got at least $207 million in grant money, and the firm itself took in $7 million. They left behind a paper trail of how they spent that money, and the Business Insider piece goes over the ways in which they spent it. Chris Brown’s touring company, for one, apparently received $10 million, and Brown himself got $5.1 million. He also got $80,000 to throw himself a birthday party. Marshmello reportedly got nearly $10 million, more than any other single musician.

The article details the ways that musicians like Steve Aoki, Rae Sremmurd, and Shinedown were paid grant money. It claims that members of Alice In Chains were paid $3.4 million, and it adds this infuriating detail: “Scott Dachroeden, a guitar tech and tour photographer who had worked with the band for years, received a cancer diagnosis in late 2022. The band, which records show did not spend grant money on benefits like health insurance, circulated a GoFundMe page on Twitter.” Dachroeden has since passed away, and sources tell Business Insider that the band didn’t do much to help him financially.

In the grand scheme of COVID-related grant-money abuses, these payments to big stars seem like pretty small potatoes, but the full report is still enough to get you spitting-nails mad. You can read the Business Insider piece here.