50 Cent Reveals Shocking $21 Million Legal Battle and the Secret Behind His Power Success

**Troy Millings** (0:00)
People, obviously, we know you from your music career, legendary, Give Riches Die a Tryin.
We heard the music, aggressive in nature, right? But Curtis Jackson, right? The businessman. Are some of the same characteristics that you translated as the artist, do they carry over to you as the business icon that you became? Do you need to be aggressive? Do you need to be stern? Like, what are some of those things that transfer?

**Curtis Jackson** (0:22)
I think when you have, when you're aggressive, that you have a, that people ever had even a little bit of fear of you. You got a second career at making them laugh.
You know, so you watch guys like Mike Tyson, like I am Mike, and then you see him at Hangover, you see him in a comedy film, and it connects because they go, look, he was great. I met Mike, he was great.

**Troy Millings** (0:45)
He didn't even bite my fucking ear.

**Curtis Jackson** (0:47)
You know, like it was like, because they expect the worst from you. Then when they have an experience, and the experience will be a pure normalcy, or it'll feel like a lot more at that point. And for me, the aggression, when I end up in a business setting, it's a lot easier to deal with me. I do struggle with one thing, right? I do struggle with growing up in a different environment.
Like sometimes I deal with attorneys, and a lot of the times I'm dealing with attorneys, right? I've spent over $21 million in legal fees. Since you've seen me, I spend a million dollars a year in legal fees now. As I have general counsel, I have people who are just around. But the more that they talk about you being a billionaire, the more you better put your ass in the house.
Are you finna get sued? They trip over some shit all 50 Why'd you do that on purpose? What the fuck did I do?
No, it's a little different. I watch the, like having opportunities at different points, because I start off, first is the music, it connects, it works, and it allows me the popularity and the ability to financially invest in different things, right? And I'm gonna bet on the things that I know I can influence myself, if I know the momentum in the music was there. So I was betting on new artists, and developing the artist's career, and sometimes they couldn't come up with the right stuff, so I was writing it for them, because I could do it myself, like at that point. But then I started wanting to do different things, and I went with, to the film projects early, I had, I started, I did the biggest straight-to-DVD movie deal ever. I thought I was making movies because we were gonna put them in the theater. And it was just going straight-to-DVD, but there was, straight-to-DVD now was straight-to-streaming. So it's straight-to-your Netflix, it's straight-to-your Hulu, it's straight-to-your, you know, like when it was Will Smith, when Will did the movie directly with Netflix, it changed how people perceive those projects. Yep, it's the monster film. And there's a, I watched it, and because there's a, there used to be a line, a clear line between television and film production, and actors that were successful on TV, the film actors wouldn't go near them. Like they would stay away from it because they felt like it was a higher grade of quality that they wanted to stay more cachet to you being a movie star than you being a television star. But now we're producing premium projects that allow UC Forest Whitaker and Gar-Father Harlem, UC Academy Award-winning actors choosing television because it builds the consistency and they can pay out the money to keep the talent happy for staying there. But you do need to know with power, everybody told me no. I pitched that show to all of the networks, and they were like, nope. And I wanted to make the project so bad that I went and I recorded eight songs, because the last place they spend money in television production is music. And it's just the last, the director will put together his dream sequence of music that's underwritten. You watch his version of it, and then the music supervisor will come in and change it to something. It feels the same, it doesn't cost you anything. And if it wouldn't sell on iTunes, I really don't want this shit in my project. That's why I made the theme music for the projects, because I said it has to be good enough for them to feel something when it comes on. Like I felt when we had television shows like Good Times, when that came on, you felt something. Good Times, temporary lay off.