If you’ve heard “Gasolina” or “Despacito,” you’ve heard Daddy Yankee. Just “Despacito” alone spent 16 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and has been streamed more than 8.9 billion times.
His 2004 album Barrio Fino sold more than eight million copies and held No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart for 24 straight weeks. He was the first reggaeton artist to take the genre on an international tour, playing more than 29 countries. The Latin Recording Academy is naming him its 2026 Person of the Year at a gala in Las Vegas on Nov. 11, with the Latin Grammys set for Nov. 12.
That honor lands on a man who walked off the stage a few years ago on purpose. At the final show of his farewell tour in December 2023, in front of more than 18,000 people at Puerto Rico’s Coliseo, he said in tears, “living a life of success is not the same as living a life with purpose.”
He quoted Jesus’ question about gaining the whole world and forfeiting your soul, then told the crowd: “I am not ashamed to tell the whole world that Jesus lives in me and that I will live for him.” Dozens of drones lit up the sky outside the arena with a cross and the words “Cristo viene,” Spanish for “Christ is coming.”
He has filled in the rest of the story since, including in a 2025 interview with the Spanish streamer Ibai. He gave his life to Jesus at 19, he said, then drifted away, “and that’s when my career exploded.” At the top of it, he started asking himself where in his life he had felt the most peace. The answer was 19.
“I had all the success in the world,” he told Ibai. “What I dreamed of as a kid, I had. I thought that was what was going to fulfill me as a human being, but I saw there was still more. The ‘more’ was the emptiness I left, which was Jesus. He let me run the world. He said, ‘Okay, go on, I’ll let you. You’re going to figure out who the way, the truth and the life is.'” So he said to himself: “Let me go back to my Father’s house again, to feel that experience I felt when I was young.”
Ibai noted that he had been shot more than once growing up in Puerto Rico. Asked whether being alive is close to a miracle, Daddy Yankee said: “I’m sure God preserved my life for this purpose. I’m very sure.”
These days he prays and reads Scripture every morning. “There’s no intermediary,” he said. “It’s you and Him.”
He is careful about how that comes across. “I don’t want people to see me and think, ‘a religious fanatic has arrived,'” he said. “I’m going to share my faith. It’s very different.”
He also told viewers that if they need help, they should ask for it, from therapists and psychiatrists as well as a spiritual guide, and that his is Jesus.
At his church in Puerto Rico, he told Ibai, he plays the drums. The regular drummer almost never shows up, so they put him on the kit.
