Hip-Hops First Billionaire – Give It Up For Jay-Z

Jay-Z has now entered the ten-figure League. According to Forbes, the 49-year-old rapper has made history as he has been proclaimed the first billionaire artist in the world of hip hop. 

The publication from Forbes went ahead to breakdown all the endeavors that come together to comprise the wealth of the successful business mogul. These endeavors include art investments, champagne brands as well as cognac brands, real estate investments, the Tidal streaming service, large stocks in very successful companies like Uber, his entertainment company which is widely known as Roc Nation, and his ever-growing music catalog.

Despite the fact that he is arrival into the class of billionaires is a very huge accomplishment, this will not be the first time that he has gone on to taste millionaire status. According to Forbes, Jay-Z together with his wife Beyoncé was officially pronounced the billion-dollar couple prior to 2019.  This took place in May 2017 when Jay-Z who was worth $810 million together with Beyoncé, worth $350 million, amassed a total of 1.16 billion as their network. 

When you think back to how Jay-Z began in his days at Brooklyn, he has really come a long way. Jay-Z admitted selling drugs and attested to knowing a lot regarding budgets. For Jay-Z, being a drug dealer meant having a deep knowledge of what to spend and what to invest. He also knew the easy way out of drug dealing. According to Jay-Z, investing in something like a barbershop happened to be a trending business in those days and was one of the easiest ways to quit drug dealing. 

Jay-Z admitted to VF that he was quite aware that dealing in drugs was not sustainable. He was aware that there will come a time when he would have to come up with an exit strategy. Getting out of drugs was never going to be easy because, according to Jay-Z, the window for getting out was extremely small and you either got locked up or ended up dead if you didn’t take it.  “I know about budgets. I was a drug dealer.” he told Vanity Fair in an interview in 2013. “To be in a drug deal, you need to know what you can spend, what you need to re-up. Or if you want to start some sort of barbershop or car wash — those were the businesses back then. Things you can get in easily to get out of [that] life.”. He went on to say

He went on to say “At some point, you have to have an exit strategy, because your window is very small; you’re going to get locked up or you’re going to die.”

The hip-hop star also has vivid memories of how his beloved mother, Gloria Carter, had to struggle so that they could survive as they grew up. He said, “We were living in a tough situation, but my mother managed; she juggled. Sometimes we’d pay the light bill, sometimes we paid the phone, sometimes the gas went off. We weren’t starving—we were eating, we were O.K. But it was things like you didn’t want to be embarrassed when you went to school; you didn’t want to have dirty sneakers or wear the same clothes over again”, he recounted.