Migos’ Takeoff: His Life in Photos

Takeoff, born Kirshnik Khari Ball, was shot and killed on Tuesday (Nov. 1) in Houston, Texas. According to a spokesperson from the Houston police department, Takeoff was at a private party at a bowling alley in downtown Houston when shots rang out around 2:35 a.m.

As one third of Migos (alongside his uncle Quavo and cousin Offset), the rapper was an influential force on the mic and on the charts for the last decade. Migos’ 2013 single “Versace” just scraped the Billboard Hot 100 (peaking at No. 99) but set the tone for the next several years of hip-hop. By early 2017, the trio topped the Hot 100 with their Lil Uzi Vert collab “Bad and Boujee,” hailing from the group’s Billboard 200-topping album Culture. Overall, Migos has earned 9.39 million equivalent album units in the U.S. for their catalog of albums, per Luminate, and 14.09 billion on-demand official streams of their songs.

Takeoff himself netted 558,000 in equivalent album units for his solo albums, including the recent collab set with Quavo, this year’s Only Built for Infinity Links.

“There are so many artists,” Takeoff told Billboard in a 2017 Migos cover story. “You got to keep coming like bow! bow! bow!, making so much music that they wonder, ‘Who are the Migos?’ We play a beat for 15, 20 seconds and know if we want to get on it. When we record a verse, it’s no more than 15, 20 minutes. We don’t have a pen and paper. We bounce off each other.”

“I try not to be cocky,” Takeoff continued. “But hey, we the sh-t, man.”