
The only three rappers 50 Cent regrets beefing with: “We had real heat for each other”
Never shy to start publicly bad-mouthing those he finds disagreeable, 50 Cent does, to his credit, seem to possess the capacity for self-reflection. The man has been involved in a lot of feuds over the course of his career, but some of them he now regrets—and he isn’t shy about publicly lamenting them.
50 famously started having issues with Ja Rule towards the end of the ’90s, with their beef periodically flaring up over the following years and decades of their lives. But his distaste for Ja Rule also passed over to Jadakiss and Fat Joe, who featured on Ja Rule’s track ‘New York’ in 2004. 50 viewed Jada and Joe’s involvement in the song as a sort of betrayal, and he took action against them. His second album, Massacre, featured the song ‘Piggy Bank,’ which dissed them both.
Jadakiss, who later claimed he’d initially not wanted to start beefing with 50, was soon drawn into the conflict, after repeatedly being asked by people if he’d heard ‘Piggy Bank’ and whether or not he intended to respond? Enough was enough, and he released ‘Checkmate,’ which dissed 50 right back. Fat Joe, for his part, released ‘My Fofo,’ his own attack on 50. Several incidents and flare-ups between 50 and his two enemies would occur over the following years.
Another of 50’s beefs during the 2000s was with Cam’ron, founder of hip-hop collective the Diplomats. Members of Dipset were closely tied to the Koch Entertainment label, but 50, in 2007, went onto Hot 97 radio and publicly declared the label to be a “graveyard” for rappers. Cam’ron responded by dissing 50’s G-Unit Records and some of its artists’ chart performances, and both rappers then released diss tracks against each other.
50’s respective beefs with Jadakiss, Fat Joe and Cam’ron, while they got nasty at times, all eventually ran their course, and, in the end, he made up with each of them. And, in conversation with The Hollywood Reporter in 2024, he expressed regret about how everything had played out with his one-time foes.
“Look, I think we wasted too much time arguing, me and Fat Joe, me and Cam’ron,” 50 said. “There’s other guys like Jada[kiss], we cleared it up easier. But we wasted time because it was just the competitive nature. It wasn’t like we crossed paths and had real heat for each other.”
With the power of hindsight, 50 had come to view his conflict with the trio as a waste of time and energy—particularly when it came to Fat Joe, with whom he is now friends. “It went on more with Joe because he’s more like me, he’s closer in character to me,” he noted. “When we’re at odds, we are at odds, and we did that for a long time.”
Time is a healer and all that, and now 50 says he’s at peace with things. He even claimed that he doesn’t mind who his friends work with anymore. They can do as they like. “When you look back at it, you go, ‘Wait, what happened?’” he said. “Because we didn’t even have no altercation or no specific thing that created it. Now he’s like my friend, and I don’t care that he has relationships with people that I don’t, because he’s always had those relationships.”