There is a number that runs through everything Hunxho has built: 22. It is the number of his block in East Atlanta — the specific strip of streets where Ibrahim Muhammad Dodo grew up, learned the rules of the environment he was raised in, and eventually decided he would leave via music rather than the alternative. It is June 22 — the date he celebrates his birthday, two days after his actual birth date of June 20, because the celebration matters more than the calendar. And it is 2022 — the year in which he was signed to 300 Entertainment, acquitted of a RICO charge, and welcomed the birth of his son Xhosen, all within the same twelve-month window. His debut album is called 22, released on March 22, 2023, and contains exactly 22 songs. The concept was not a marketing decision. It was a reckoning — a 26-year-old man cataloguing the year that changed his life into a musical structure whose very architecture reflected what the number meant.
| Quick Facts | Details |
|---|---|
| Real Name | Ibrahim Muhammad Dodo |
| Stage Name | Hunxho (pronounced “huncho”) |
| Date of Birth | June 20, 1999 |
| Birthplace | Greensboro, North Carolina, USA |
| Raised | East Atlanta, Georgia (block 22) |
| Age (2026) | 26 years old |
| Height | 6 ft 7 in (200 cm) |
| Zodiac | Gemini |
| Father | Nigerian — rapper; not present during childhood |
| Mother | African American — raised Hunxho as single mother |
| Religion | Islam — practicing Muslim |
| Label | 300 Entertainment |
| First Song Written | 2017 |
| Breakthrough Single | “Let’s Get It” (2021) — remixed by 21 Savage; 40M+ Spotify plays |
| Debut Album | 22 (March 22, 2023) — 22 songs |
| Gold Single | “Your Friends” (August 23, 2024) — remixed by Summer Walker |
| XXL Freshman | 2024 Class |
| RICO Charge | Arrested 2022 — acquitted |
| 2023 Arrest | Gun possession — LYFE ATL Nightclub, Atlanta, June 2023 |
| Children | Daughter Xoe (b. 2023); Son Xhosen (b. 2022) |
| Ex-girlfriend | Keyshia Cole — dated April 2024–early 2025 |
| Influences | Young Thug, Future, Rich Homie Quan, Gucci Mane, Skooly |
| Self-description | “Street Poet” |
| @hunxho — 1.4M+ followers | |
| Net Worth (est. 2026) | $1 million – $3 million |
That kind of specificity — the attention to resonance, the insistence on meaning where other artists would settle for branding — is what separates Hunxho from the large number of melodic Atlanta trap artists who have emerged in the years since Young Thug and Future established the sonic template that the entire Southern rap ecosystem now navigates. He calls himself a Street Poet. The label is not vanity. It is a description of a specific aesthetic commitment: to find in the experiences of the street the emotional and linguistic material for something that communicates beyond the street, to the people who have never been there and to the people who know exactly what he is talking about.
Greensboro to East Atlanta: The Origins
Ibrahim Muhammad Dodo was born on June 20, 1999, in Greensboro, North Carolina — a mid-sized city in the Piedmont Triad region of the state, known for its textile industry history and its significant African American cultural and academic community. He did not stay long. The family relocated to East Atlanta, Georgia — the neighbourhood on the southeastern side of Atlanta proper that has produced a remarkable concentration of hip-hop talent across the past two decades — where he would spend the formative years that shaped his sound, his worldview, and the specific subject matter that his music returns to with the consistency of someone who has not forgotten where he comes from.
His father is Nigerian — a rapper himself, whose absence during Ibrahim’s childhood is documented in multiple interviews Hunxho has given about his upbringing. His mother is African American — the parent who raised him, alongside his siblings, in the specific circumstances of a single-parent household in East Atlanta that the neighbourhood’s economic and social character made both challenging and, in the musical sense, generative. East Atlanta in the 2000s and early 2010s was the environment that produced Gucci Mane, Young Thug, and the Rich Homie Quan-led wave of melodic trap that reshaped Southern rap aesthetics; growing up surrounded by that music, in the neighbourhood those artists came from, constituted an informal education whose influence on Hunxho’s sound is direct and acknowledged.
He is a practicing Muslim — his father’s Nigerian heritage carries an Islamic faith tradition that Ibrahim has maintained as a genuine personal commitment rather than a biographical footnote. The single “True To My Religion,” from his debut album 22, addresses his relationship with that faith with the specific honesty of someone who acknowledges the gap between belief and practice without abandoning either. “Hunxho Laments Not Staying ‘True To My Religion,'” the UPROXX Sessions headline read when he performed it — a description that captures the song’s emotional register precisely. It is not a song of triumph but of reckoning.
Basketball, Colorado, and the Road Not Taken
Before music became the plan, basketball was the plan. In high school, Hunxho developed into a serious player — the 6 ft 7 in frame that makes him immediately distinctive as a rapper was, in adolescence, a genuine athletic asset. He played at a level that justified relocating to Colorado for college, which he did — leaving East Atlanta for an environment whose character could not have been more different, in pursuit of a future whose shape he had not yet fully determined.
The Colorado chapter ended the way several chapters in Hunxho’s early life ended: not according to plan. The specifics of what derailed the basketball path are not fully detailed in public interviews, but the combination of the streets’ ongoing pull and the specific legal complications that would eventually produce the 2022 RICO charge suggest that the East Atlanta environment had claims on him that a college campus in Colorado could not fully neutralise. He moved back to Atlanta. He wrote his first song in 2017.
The transition from basketball to music is, in retrospect, the hinge on which everything turns — the moment at which a person with a specific physical gift chose a different arena for its expression. The discipline that high-level basketball requires — the practice repetition, the spatial intelligence, the capacity to read a situation and respond faster than conscious thought — translates into music-making in ways that are not always articulated but are often felt in the structural tightness of the work that results. Hunxho’s songs are not loose or meandering. They are constructed with the efficiency of someone who learned, in a different context, that wasted motion costs points.
“You can’t have one foot in, one foot out,” he told Dirty Glove in 2021 — speaking about the decision to leave the streets for music. The framing is absolute and deliberate. It is the framing of someone who has applied the same total commitment that basketball requires to a new discipline, and who understands that partial commitment produces partial results.
The Streets, the First Songs, and Building Quietly (2017–2020)
The years between Hunxho’s return to Atlanta and the breakthrough of “Let’s Get It” in 2021 were years of foundational work conducted largely outside the awareness of the broader music industry. He wrote his first song in 2017. His first release appeared on streaming platforms in August 2017 — self-released, without label support, into the specific ecosystem of SoundCloud and Spotify that Atlanta’s independent rap scene had learned to navigate effectively in the years following the streaming revolution’s restructuring of music distribution.
His first single under 1Team Entertainment — “Last Song” — appeared in January 2018, followed by further releases through 2018 that documented his developing voice and sound without yet producing the specific record that would break through. The music from this period reflects the influences he has consistently cited — Young Thug’s melodic unpredictability, Rich Homie Quan’s emotional directness, Future’s atmospheric production choices, Gucci Mane’s narrative specificity about East Atlanta street life — absorbed and processed into something that was developing its own character rather than simply replicating its sources.
He also drew, less obviously but no less significantly, from artists whose aesthetic distance from trap music is considerable: India.Arie, Anthony Hamilton — soul and R&B performers whose emotional depth and melodic sophistication represent a different tradition that Hunxho has described as equally formative. The combination of street rap’s lyrical directness with soul music’s emotional register is precisely what the “Street Poet” identity names — and it is the combination that makes his best work feel different in texture from the artists who influenced it, even when the sonic DNA is recognisably connected.
He spent time in the East Atlanta streets during this period — a fact he has addressed directly in interviews, with the specific candour of someone who is not interested in either glorifying or minimising what that time involved. “Before pursuing his rap career, Dodo spent time making money in the East Atlanta streets,” the record notes. He has not elaborated publicly on the specifics. He has moved on, and the music is the evidence of the direction he moved.
A 2020 release — under the 1865 LLC imprint — preceded the signing and the major breakthrough, documenting a voice that had been developing in relative obscurity for three years and was approaching the moment when the specific record would arrive.
“Let’s Get It” and the 21 Savage Remix: The Breakthrough
In July 2021, Hunxho released “Let’s Get It” — a single that became, by the standards of an unsigned artist operating outside the major label system, a genuine viral moment. The song accumulated streaming numbers that caught the attention of the industry infrastructure that had not previously been paying attention, and it produced the specific outcome that streaming-era breakthroughs tend to produce when they are genuine rather than manufactured: a remix.
The remix featured 21 Savage — the Atlanta-born (London-raised) rapper whose own career trajectory from the same general ecosystem as Hunxho’s had made him one of the most commercially reliable collaborators in Southern hip-hop. The “Let’s Get It” remix has accumulated over 40 million Spotify plays — a figure that, for an artist at Hunxho’s stage of development, constituted the kind of proof of audience that label deals are built on.
“Let’s Get It” was part of the Street Poet 2 project — a mixtape that established the self-description that has become the central axis of his public identity. The street poet is not a contradiction in terms. It is a specific tradition within hip-hop — the rapper whose lyrical intelligence and emotional depth give the street narrative a dimension that transcends pure documentation — and Hunxho’s claim to the title is backed by the specific quality of the writing rather than by assertion alone.
300 Entertainment signed him on the strength of this momentum. The label — founded by Lyor Cohen, Roger Gold, Todd Moscowitz, and Kevin Liles — had previously developed Megan Thee Stallion, Young Thug, and Gunna into major commercial entities, and understood the specific trajectory that Hunxho’s streaming numbers represented. The signing brought distribution infrastructure, marketing resources, and the professional support framework that independent releases, however successful, cannot provide at scale.
2022: The RICO, the Son, and the Signing
The year 2022 was, by Hunxho’s own account and by the factual record, the most consequential year of his life to that point. Three things happened, each significant enough on its own terms to define a year; all three occurring within the same twelve months produced the specific weight that the album 22 was designed to carry.
He was signed to 300 Entertainment — the formal institutional commitment that the “Let’s Get It” breakthrough had made inevitable, and that provided the platform for the projects that followed. His first 300 project, Street Poetry, released in March 2022, featured the “Let’s Get It” remix and the single “Made Me” with NoCap — establishing the commercial and critical parameters of his label debut.
He was acquitted of a RICO charge — the federal racketeering statute that has been applied to Atlanta rap circles with increasing frequency in recent years, producing prosecutions that have significantly affected the careers of multiple artists from the same ecosystem Hunxho emerged from. The acquittal was not a peripheral biographical detail. It was a survival — the kind of legal outcome that, had it gone differently, would have ended the music career entirely. He has addressed it obliquely in his work without dwelling on it publicly in ways that would require a legal and biographical elaboration he has declined to provide.
His son Xhosen was born in 2022 — the child whose name Hunxho gave to the June 16 project released that year, and whose arrival is documented in the specific emotional register of a father’s first reckoning with the weight of parental responsibility. The Xhosen project features WanMor on “Heartless” and guest appearances from Lil PJ, Rot Ken, and Lil Darius — a release whose title made explicit what fatherhood had done to his sense of what he was making music for.
The 22 Album: Debut, Statement, and Legacy
Hunxho’s debut album 22 was released on March 22, 2023. It contains 22 songs. It debuted on the Billboard 200. It features Tee Grizzley, Yung Mal, and Lil Poppa — collaborators whose presence reflects the specific community of Southern rap artists whose aesthetic Hunxho’s work engages with rather than merely adjacent to.
The concept — as explained in HipHopDX’s Play X Play breakdown with Hunxho himself — is layered in a way that justifies the structural decision: 22 as East Atlanta block number, as birthday celebration date, as the year of the signing and acquittal and son’s birth. The album is not titled 22 because the number sounded good. It is titled 22 because the number contains everything — the place, the person, the year, the survival.
The single “True To My Religion” is the album’s emotional centrepiece — the track in which his Islamic faith, his street life, and his musical ambition are placed in explicit tension with each other, producing something more honest about the contradictions of a life like his than most artists of his generation are willing to attempt. The UPROXX Sessions performance of the song — acoustic, stripped, facing the camera directly — is one of the most compelling documents of what his “Street Poet” identity actually means in practice.
“48 Laws Of Power” — another standout from the album — applies the Robert Greene framework to street experience in a way that reflects the self-educating intelligence of someone who reads seriously and connects what he reads to what he knows.
In May 2023, the eight-song EP 4 Days in LA followed — produced primarily by Murda Beatz, featuring Lil Dallas, and documenting a West Coast creative detour that expanded his sonic vocabulary without abandoning the East Atlanta foundation. He then joined the “It’s Only Us Tour” as a supporting act for Lil Baby — alongside Rylo Rodriguez and GloRilla — a nationwide tour that placed him before audiences far larger than his own headline shows could yet produce, and that functioned as the most effective industry education a developing artist can receive: performing every night, in front of crowds who came for someone else, and earning them anyway.
XXL Freshman 2024 and the R&B Pivot
In June 2024, Hunxho was named to the XXL Freshman Class of 2024 — the annual designation that functions as the hip-hop industry’s most widely recognised formal acknowledgement of emerging artists whose trajectories justify investment and attention. The class is both a recognition and a prediction; inclusion in it typically precedes the commercial expansion that the infrastructure it represents can accelerate.
August 2024 brought “Your Friends” — a gold-certified single released on August 23 that represented a deliberate pivot in sonic direction. The song is oriented toward R&B rather than trap — a shift that Hunxho has described as reflecting where his artistic instincts were moving rather than a strategic calculation about market positioning. “Your Friends” was remixed by Summer Walker — the Atlanta R&B artist whose own melodic sensibility is closely aligned with the direction Hunxho was moving — and the remix extended the song’s commercial reach significantly.
The For Her project, released in October 2024, developed the R&B direction more fully — a body of work that demonstrated the range of an artist whose “Street Poet” identity had always contained more emotional and sonic possibility than the trap classification might suggest.
His daughter Xoe was born in 2023 — a second child, alongside Xhosen, who deepened the fatherhood dimension of his public identity and the specific emotional subject matter that his music increasingly addresses.
Keyshia Cole: The Relationship That Captivated the Internet
In April 2024, Hunxho and Keyshia Cole — the R&B singer whose career stretches back to her 2005 debut The Way It Is — confirmed a romantic relationship that became one of the more discussed celebrity pairings in the music world across the following year. The age gap — Cole was born October 11, 1981, making her approximately 18 years Hunxho’s senior — attracted immediate and sustained commentary, most of which both parties addressed by simply continuing the relationship on their own terms.
The moments that defined the public narrative of their partnership were specific and vivid: Cole tattooed his real name “Ibrahim” on her chest — a declaration of commitment whose permanence was noted by everyone who observed it. For his part, Hunxho gifted Cole a pink Maybach for her 43rd birthday in October 2024 — a gesture whose financial and romantic significance was documented publicly and widely.
Their musical collaboration produced “Don’t Let Me Down” — a track that placed Cole’s established R&B identity alongside Hunxho’s developing melodic sensibility in ways that served both artists.
The relationship ended in early 2025. The split was confirmed publicly in March 2025. Cole, appearing on the Breakfast Club in May 2025, confirmed that the “Ibrahim” tattoo remained on her chest — a detail that captured, with the specific poignancy of permanent ink, the irreversibility of certain commitments. Neither party has provided detailed public commentary on the circumstances of the separation.
Net Worth: What the Numbers Show at 26
| Income Source | Estimated Contribution |
|---|---|
| 300 Entertainment signing advance | $250,000–$500,000 (est.) |
| Streaming — “Let’s Get It” remix (40M+ plays) | Ongoing royalties |
| 22 album Billboard 200 debut | Label advance recoupment + royalties |
| “Your Friends” gold certification | RIAA-certified sales and streams |
| Tour revenue — Lil Baby “It’s Only Us Tour” (supporting) | Performance fees |
| Merchandise and brand deals | Additional |
| Estimated Total Net Worth (2026) | $1 million – $3 million |
The figure reflects a career that is, at 26, still in its commercial ascent. The infrastructure is in place — label deal, gold single, XXL recognition, Billboard 200 debut — and the trajectory of the earning curve points consistently upward. The net worth figure is a floor, not a ceiling.
Conclusion
Hunxho was born Ibrahim Muhammad Dodo on June 20, 1999, in Greensboro, North Carolina, raised in East Atlanta’s block 22 by a single African American mother, shaped by a Nigerian Muslim father whose absence informed the faith his son kept and the music his son made about keeping it imperfectly. He played basketball seriously enough to move to Colorado for college, came back to Atlanta, spent time in the streets, wrote his first song in 2017, broke through with a 21 Savage remix in 2021, was signed, acquitted, and became a father all in 2022, released a debut album that contained the meaning of that number in its bones, joined the XXL Freshman class of 2024, released a gold single, dated Keyshia Cole, became a father twice, and is 26 years old.
The Street Poet from block 22 is still writing.