Five rappers’ weirdest business ventures
As hip-hop started to develop on the streets of the Bronx during the 1970s, it wasn’t remotely obvious that, within a couple of decades, it would transform into one of the most lucrative, commercialised forms of popular culture around. But, for good or ill, wealth came to play a central role in hip-hop—and, for many of those who mastered the craft, acquiring riches represented a worthy pursuit unto itself.
That so many hip-hop stars ended up becoming successful businesspeople maybe shouldn’t come as a surprise. The scene’s very development required its adherents to act entrepreneurially. Labels and radio stations weren’t initially very interested in hip-hop, which meant that early rappers had to think creatively to get their music out there to a wider audience. They had to become effective, creative salespeople, a characteristic that remains discernible within lots of rappers to this day.
Hip-hop, upon becoming an extremely successful genre, came to embody some of the values of American capitalism itself. Rappers’ success, on the one hand, represented a good ol’ fashioned rags-to-riches story, in which impoverished young people pulled up their bootstraps, worked hard at their craft, and made lots of money. But, even if that rosier way of looking at things is true, it is also true that vicious competition and grand displays of wealth came to be widely celebrated.
It would be overstating things to say that rap became solely focused on materialism and money, because there has always been socially conscious hip-hop with an anti-capitalist bent to it. But the fetishisation of wealth did become dominant, with some rappers becoming astoundingly wealthy businesspeople along the way. But, while some entrepreneurial rappers have invested wisely in their feverish pursuit of wealth, others have become involved in some deeply odd ventures. This is a look at those people.
Five rappers’ weirdest business ventures
5. Birdman’s shady oil and gas business
Birdman is, first and foremost, known as a rapper and record exec. Along with his brother Ronald “Slim” Williams, Birdman set up Cash Money Records and made a lot of money from its successes with artists like Drake, Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne. He’s actually considered to be among the wealthiest hip-hop artists in the world, with Forbes in 2017 listing him as the world’s fourth-richest hip-hop star with a net worth of $110 million. But that money didn’t just come from his music activities. His portfolio is much wider, with his other ventures including clothing lines, vodka and… oil and gas exploration.
Birdman and his brother reportedly set up a company called Bronald Oil and Gas to find and tap into new energy sources, with Birdman even getting a head tattoo of an oil rig just to emphasize the point. But, aside from that, the details about the business were always quite hazy. In fact, some reports claimed that oil and gas business regulators had never even heard of a company called Bronald Oil and Gas, while more recent reports from 2023 claim that the oil business had been scammed out of millions of dollars. The truth of Birdman’s activities in the oil business remains hazy, but, in any case, it certainly seems like a grubby affair.
4. Lil Jon’s forays into porn and the wellness industry
Lil Jon, thanks to his mainstreaming of the crunk sound, is a musical innovator, but he’s also been keen to break into other sectors, too. Bizarrely for a man known for helping to popularise a style of music defined by a high tempo and shouty vocals, Jon is actually a player within the wellness industry, founding a brand called Soul Chakra in 2024. It pushes products like crystals and guided meditation albums, of which Lil Jon has recorded two. This couldn’t be any more different than the sound that made him famous.
Just to highlight the degree of change that Jon’s interests have taken in recent years, it’s worth pointing out that one of the other industries within which he used to work was porn. According to the press release accompanying one of his porn films, a 2011 flick entitled Club Lil Jon, the rapper “was involved in every detail of production from coaching the actresses on how to achieve maximum sensuality to writing a sexy score to keep the action sizzling.”
3. 50 Cent’s flavoured water
50 Cent is a famously successful businessman, with interests in the music, film and fashion sectors. But, while those are business areas that you’d probably expect to find a figure like 50 Cent operating within, he’s also involved in plenty of other industries, with some being quite a bit more surprising than others. Does 50 Cent, for instance, look especially like someone who peddles vitamin water? Well, he does, and he’s apparently made a lot of money from it.
A rapper with 50 Cent’s oeuvre might more reasonably be expected to sell alcoholic beverages, which, to be fair, he does, too. He has his own brands of champagne and cognac, but the weird thing is that he doesn’t actually drink himself. He’s just happy to make money off other people’s desire to do so.
2. Eminem’s spaghetti restaurant and brick-selling scheme
“His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy / There’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti.” So begins the first verse of Eminem’s megahit ‘Lose Yourself,’ a powerful depiction of anxiety. What this line shouldn’t do is make someone hungry for a delicious spaghetti meal, but that, ultimately, is the road that this lyric has somehow gone down. The “mom’s spaghetti” thing eventually became a popular meme, with Eminem himself eventually jumping on board and actually opening up the Mom’s Spaghetti pop-up diner. He even launched a jarred pasta sauce under the same name.
As surprising as these ventures are, the spaghetti restaurant and the jarred sauce aren’t even the weirdest money-making schemes that Slim has ever embarked on. When his childhood home in Detroit was demolished in 2013, the rapper made sure that he kept hold of the bricks that had once been a part of the building. He then sold them for a few hundred dollars each—and people actually bought them.
1. Snoop Dogg’s Welsh football team
Snoop Dogg has invested in and promoted all sorts of stuff. Among his many business ventures are products and services that make total sense, namely, things related to the music and cannabis sectors. Given his career as a rapper and his famous love for smoking weed, those are areas that make complete sense for Snoop to invest in. But some of the other stuff is wildly unexpected. He has invested in Reddit, for one thing, while he’s also a player in alcohol and video games.
But it’s his recent investment in the Welsh football club Swansea City that has really captured people’s attention. He is now a co-owner of the club alongside Croatian footballing legend Luka Modrić, which, frankly, is an odd thought. Before Ryan Reynold and Rob McElhenney made a cultural phenomenon out of fellow Welsh club Wrexham, it wasn’t exactly normal for American celebrities to get involved with British football clubs. But now, in the wake of Wrexham’s success, Snoop Dogg and Luca Modrić are business partners. It’s a strange world we live in.