Swizz Beatz Was Not Megaupload CEO

Swizz Beatz attends the 'Bronx Arts Recognize' event to benefit the Bronx Charter School for the Arts at the Avenue in New York.

Jerritt Clark/Getty Images

In the latest twist in the Megaupload file-sharing saga, hip-hop producer Swizz Beatz was apparently not the company's CEO, as has been widely reported. Ira Rothken, an attorney for the company, says that to his knowledge Swizz "was never involved in any meaningful way. He was negotiating to become the CEO, but it was never official."

It's been a wild week for the popular file-sharing service, which was shut down by federal prosecutors yesterday after the arrest in New Zealand of four of the seven defendants named in massive charges of content piracy. The company is now fighting the charges, trying to recover its servers and get back online.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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