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Artist News Legal
50 Cent doesn’t have $8.5 million worth of bitcoin
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 27 February 2018
50 Cent has denied that he is sitting on a big pile of bitcoins stemming from sales of his 2014 album ‘Animal Ambition’. This follows reports that he had a bitcoin collection worth up to $8.5 million. Something that would be of interest to the court that oversaw the rapper’s recent bankruptcy proceedings.
50 Cent declared himself bankrupt in 2015 amid a legal battle with Lastonia Leviston, who sued him over a sex tape he had posted online in which she appeared. Though the bankruptcy didn’t actually stop that litigation, as he had been hoped. The court subsequently approved a bankruptcy settlement in 2016.
If, as TMZ reported last month, 50 Cent had been sitting on 700 bitcoins since 2014, that might have changed those bankruptcy proceedings somewhat. The gossip site said that the bitcoins gathered through sales of ‘Animal Ambition’ had been unredeemed. Worth $400,000 in 2014, that many bitcoins would now be worth anything up to $8.5 million.
However, in a legal filing seen by rival gossip site The Blast, 50 Cent’s lawyers insist that any bitcoins earned by the 2014 record were cashed in long ago. They told the court that a third party had handled bitcoin sales of ‘Animal Ambition’ and passed monies onto their client in dollars.
They added that the rapper “never owned, and does not own, a bitcoin account or any bitcoins, and to the best of his knowledge, none of his companies had a bitcoin account from 2014 to the present”.
As for why 50 Cent didn’t just say this when the TMZ report first circulated – well – because the idea of him selling records for bitcoins and then sitting on the virtual cash while it boomed in value made him look like a shrewd operator.
The Blast quote the rapper as stating to the court: “As a general matter, so long as a press story is not irreparably damaging to my image or brand, I usually do not feel the need to publicly deny the reporting. This is particularly true when I feel the press report in question is favourable to my image or brand, even if the report is based on a misunderstanding of the facts or contains outright falsehoods”.
