Mike Posner

Origins and early life

Michael Robert Henrion Posner was born in Detroit on 12 February 1988 and grew up in Southfield, a suburb his parents chose for its schools.

Work and career

His father, Jon Posner, a criminal defence lawyer in Detroit for forty years, was Jewish, and his mother, Roberta Henrion, is Catholic: “my mom's actually Catholic, my dad's Jewish”, he said in 2010, and in 2006 Duke University's student newspaper described him as “white, Jewish and passionate about hip-hop”. He is thus Jewish by descent, through his father; in August 2026 he wrote that he had given his life to Christ a year earlier, and he shared a video of his baptism.

In his last semester of sociology at Duke University, he released his debut single, “Cooler Than Me”, which reached number six on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2010 and opened his album “31 Minutes to Takeoff”. As a songwriter he co-wrote Justin Bieber's “Boyfriend” and Maroon 5's “Sugar”, which both reached number two on the same chart, in 2012 and 2015. His song “I Took a Pill in Ibiza”, released in 2015, became a worldwide hit in a remix by the Norwegian duo SeeB, reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2016 and earned him a Grammy nomination for Song of the Year in 2017.

Later years

After his father died of brain cancer in 2017, he walked across the United States, from Asbury Park, New Jersey, on 15 April 2019 to Venice Beach, California, on 18 October, a journey halted for several weeks in August by a rattlesnake bite in Colorado. On 1 June 2021 he reached the summit of Mount Everest, a climb in memory of his father that raised more than $260,000 for the Detroit Justice Center, which works for criminal justice reform. His later albums include “At Night, Alone” in 2016, “A Real Good Kid” in 2019 and “The Beginning” in 2025.