“Put me anywhere on God’s green Earth, I’ll triple my worth.” Hip-hop’s first billionaire has such a talent for rhymes that he was once described as “America’s urban Shakespeare”. Jay-Z clearly hasn’t lost his touch for insouciant moneymaking either, as a busy month of disposals demonstrates. The musician and entrepreneur sold 50% of his $640m champagne brand, Armand de Brignac, to the world’s leading luxury group LVMH, which has undertaken to expand the brand globally. Oatly, the Swedish vegan-milk group in which he is invested, took its first step towards a $10bn initial public offering (IPO). And now, notes Forbes, Jay-Z has bagged $297m from a deal to sell his majority share in the music-streaming company Tidal to Jack Dorsey’s mobile-payment company Square.
The rhyming advocates of luxury
If Jay-Z is streamlining his investments, it may be part of a wider stock-taking. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the musician-entrepreneur’s first album, Reasonable Doubt, which was released on his own Roc-A-Fella Records label and marked the start of a business and rap career that have been entwined ever since. Jay-Z has “poured his talent and wealth into so many ventures that it is easy to lose track”, says the Financial Times. He was “ahead of his time in business in a way that is only now clear”. Every Instagram influencer “owes something to the performative consumption pioneered by hip-hop” artists, the original “rhyming advocates of luxury”. Jay-Z learnt early “that a celebrity could not only be paid to perform songs or endorse products but might also own the rights to both”.
“The rapper’s character is essentially a conceit, a first-person literary creation,” Jay-Z once observed. But in the beginning, his main driver was self-sufficiency. Born Shawn Carter in 1969, he grew up in 1980s Brooklyn, then “infested with crack cocaine”, says The Guardian. “We came out of a generation of black people who finally got the point: no one’s going to help us…Not even our fathers stuck around,” Jay-Z wrote in his autobiography, Decoded. “Success [meant] being a boss, not a dependent.” Nicknamed Jay-Z when he was a kid (it was a riff on Brooklyn’s J and Z subway lines), Shawn was a clever boy who adapted to survive. Beginning at the age of 12 – the year he shot his older brother in the shoulder for stealing a ring – he spent 14 years “hustling on the streets” to support his family during the crack epidemic. It was a time, he later said, when “children became parents and parents became children”.
Subscribe to MoneyWeek
Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE
Sign up to Money Morning
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Rich material in a troubled past
Jay-Z began rapping on street corners in his teens. But his big break came in the mid-1990s when he met a pair of youthful impresarios – Kareem “Biggs” Burke and Damon Dash – who put up the cash to record his songs. Times were so tight that Dash pressed the discs himself, selling them from his car. But Reasonable Doubt went platinum, and since then Jay-Z has sold more than 50 million albums globally. During these formative years it was Dash who established the Roc-A-Fella empire, which eventually came to encompass clothes (Rocawear), beauty products, music publishing and entertainment (Roc Nation). But Jay-Z gradually bought him out. “I’m not a businessman; I’m a business, man” is a favourite aphorism. His long-standing marriage to Beyoncé Knowles, the most successful female artist of the 2000s, is a case in point. Music’s leading “power couple” have won critical acclaim – and sold millions of albums – charting the ups and downs of their relationship.
Asked to name his influences in 2010, the rapper joked that “the closest person you could compare me to is Joe Kennedy…He started as a bootlegger! Ahaha! They say behind every great fortune is a great crime… I believe it.” Jay-Z has always found rich material in his troubled past, but it was clear even then that he was “the boy from the hood who turned out good”, says The Guardian. A decade on, not much has changed.
-
Elon Musk enters the White House – what happens now?Elon Musk has achieved the seemingly impossible many times before in the business world. But will he be able to cut the US government down to size?
-
Sri Mulyani Indrawati: Indonesia’s Iron LadyKeeping Sri Mulyani Indrawati on as Indonesia's finance minister has steadied the ship after the election of a former military general spooked financial markets
-
Media mogul James Dolan takes straight shot at the limelightControversial media mogul James Dolan has been hailed as a visionary for his Sphere arena in Las Vegas. But can he square the circle financially?
-
Do we need central banks, or is it time to privatise money?Analysis Free banking is one alternative to central banks, but would switching to a radical new system be worth the risk?
-
Byju’s – the startling rise and fallIndia’s educational technology start-up Byju's attracted big-name backers and soared to vertiginous heights during Covid. It has now plummeted. What happened?
-
Indian magnate Ratan Tata dies at 86 – how he made a mark in the UKRatan Tata took the helm of the family business in 1991 and transformed it into an international conglomerate worth $365bn. His death plunged India into mourning
-
Jimmy Carter makes history as the first former US president to turn 100When Jimmy Carter left office, few would have predicted an outbreak of national affection for the former president’s 100th birthday four decades later. But his legacy is worth celebrating
-
Eric Adams: the New York City mayor charged with corruptionControversy and accusations of corruption have followed Eric Adams in his rise to the mayoralty of New York City. Now he has been charged with a federal crime.
