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Killer Mike owes his start in the rap game to Big Boi.

His name first got out there following his appearance on Outkast’s Grammy-winning track ‘The Whole World’ and, after that success, he signed onto Big Boi’s Purple Ribbon Records, albeit it was called Aquemini Records at the time. Mike’s debut album Monster was then released by Aquemini and Columbia, reaching number ten on the Billboard 200, announcing the emcee as a new force in the scene. But eventually things between him and Big Boi turned sour, and rumour had it that things even turned violent once.

Following the success of Monster, Mike had been planning for a second album called Ghetto Extraordinary, but it ran into trouble reportedly because of a dispute between Big Boi and Sony Music. It never was released on Aquemini or Purple Ribbon, as it later became, and, for one reason or another, Mike’s relationship with Big Boi broke down. There were even reports going around that their dispute had gotten physical in their shared hometown of Atlanta, although Mike dispelled that notion in remarks made to HipHopDX in 2007.

“First of all, let me start by saying it’s nothing… I don’t want anybody to think that this is a beef,” he claimed, adding, “I also want to apologise to everybody in the A-Town, Morris Brown, my mother, grandmother, Big Boi’s mother, Dre’s mother and anybody who may have witnessed what wasn’t me and Big Boi fighting, but what was two grown men not seeing eye to eye. I never touched him, and he never touched me. Some of the things they said I did to Big Boi, if I had did, I don’t know if I could have lived with that.”

Mike painted the supposed beef as a little falling out, noting, “I think it’s just two people, who were friends and care about each other who stopped doing business together, and that’s not always pretty”. However, he also said how it’s all water under the bridge as he’s better off not having to cross paths with Big Boi in terms of work. In a larger professional capacity, he argued that the distance and regarding each other as “friendly competitors” has helped them ensure that their home of Atlanta retains its cult status at the top of the charts. “He’s best where he is, and I’m best where I’m at”, concluded Mike.

Reports of Killer Mike and Big Boi’s feud at the time suggested that things had gotten nasty, but Mike seemed to be fairly at ease when addressing the rumours in public. In another interview with The Boombox in 2011, he explained how he realised that his ambitions during that time were affecting the way he saw the situation with Big Boi.

“A lot of times we take issue with other people and not with ourselves,” he mused, adding, “My ambition was bigger than what my mind was ready for at the moment. So it took me leaving [Purple Label] and experiencing the bumps and bruises for myself to fully understand how difficult it is to be an artist and to run a record company.” As a final note, he highlighted his maturity in understanding that holding any sort of grudges would be a fool’s errand for the real call was coming from within the house, and he had to be the one to deal with his own feelings.

Killer Mike and Big Boi reconciled in the end, and, in March 2025, it emerged that they’d been in the studio together, ostensibly with a new Big Boi album in mind. Feuds can often seem intractable in hip-hop, but there are always roads out of them.