Nick Cannon hints that Mariah’s ex was right to be jealous of him

Nick Cannon isn’t surprised that Bryan Tanaka was jealous of his closeness to Mariah Carey, but he was pretty surprised to hear they’d split.

Tanaka, 34, reportedly envied Carey’s relationship with ex-husband Cannon, 36, with whom she shares 5-year-old twins Moroccan and Monroe.

“Most men are jealous of me,” Cannon cracked to Entertainment Tonight on Monday. “I’m joking. But I know nothing about [their breakup]. For me, at the end of the day, she’s an amazing mother and we focus on our kids. That’s never going to change no matter who’s in my life or who’s in her life. We have kids together, so we’ll always be family.”

Cannon, who recently welcomed a son with ex-girlfriend Brittany Bell, even insinuated that a reunion with Carey, 47, may not be out of the question.

“That is always family — and when I say that, I say that to a level of I will always love her,” he said. “That’s always my dream girl. Like, to me, just because we’re not intimate, I’m closer with her than probably I’ve ever been just based off of that’s my family, that’s the mother of my children.”

“We talk every single day,” he continued. “We spend more time with the kids’ school, karate class, gymnastics class, like, it’s a full-time job. I wouldn’t want to mess up what we have right now trying to do something else.”

Cannon previously told Howard Stern that he thought Carey and Tanaka’s relationship may have been exaggerated for her E! docuseries, “Mariah’s World,” but the breakup actually made him less convinced of that.

“I don’t know because I’m not in it … I thought it was bizarre as somebody watching from afar,” he said. “I thought the show was very produced. I didn’t say that their relationship was just for show,” he added. “I thought the show fabricated a lot of stuff because, as a producer, I was like, ‘Oh, they positioned that. They put the cameras there.’ I was watching it from that perspective.”