50 Cent: Taking Care of Business

He has said that he will retire if Kanye West sells more records than him. He has also said that he would like to challenge West to a televised debate. And he has argued that nearly all of the current interest accorded West is entirely owed to him. He has showman's flaire in moments like this, Don King meets Muhammad Ali, selling a spectacle, drumming up business, popcorn, peanuts cotton candy,come one, come all. His words will bring the masses. That's what hustlers do, and that's what hustlers know. And 50 Cent, above all else, is a hustler, one that mastered the fine art of speaking in intoxicating sound bites long before publicists were paid to be in the picture. Sometimes those bites feel scripted, other times they feel spontaneous. But they are seldom boring. Like when 50 Cent laughs and says of his rivalry with West, "I'm King Kong. Kanye is human. Humans run when they see King Kong, because they're scared." Though his face betrays no emotion, you can feel him thinking, "Are you entertained!!!"

That is one side of 50 Cent: combative, funny, brilliant. The artist whose career sparked with "How to Rob" — a single about redistributing the wealth of other rappers into his pockets — and continued to flame brightly after several street-beloved mix tapes and publicized battles with everyone from Ja Rule to Cam'ron. But there is another side of 50 Cent: the businessman. As the man born Curtis Jackson lounges on an oversize leather couch in his sparsely decorated Manhattan office, having already finished three meetings by midday, this is the side that emerges the more he talks about why he's so resolute, so unwaveringly convinced that his new album, Curtis, will move more copies than West's Graduation come September 11th, the day both are released.

"My first album was the highest-selling LP of 2003," he says, pointing to the fact that 2003's Get Rich or Die Tryin' moved more than 800,000 copies in the four days after it dropped. He goes on to note that his follow-up, The Massacre, was the second-highest-selling album of 2005. "That album sold something like 1.14 million in four days. Jay-Z's last album sold something like 1.6 total. Kanye works for Jay-Z. Kanye is a worker bee. He's never been able to generate a fraction of the interest that I have."

50 Cent loves numbers. And he should. Thus far, numbers have done very well by him. (Though he's not infallible: Jay-Z's last album sold closer to 2 million.) That he survived being shot nine — count 'em, nine — times has gone a long way toward establishing him as an international superstar. All told, he has sold more than 20 million albums worldwide, cementing his faith that numbers are the only true indicator of how listeners feel about his music. Other numbers work as well. The money he's made from his minority stake in VitaminWater when Coca-Cola purchased the company earlier this year for $4.1 billion are estimated to be in the $100 million to $400 million range. And that's just substantial icing on a multilayered cake of enterprises that include clothing, sneakers, real estate, films. His estimated 2006 income, according to Forbes, was $32 million. Naturally, more brand extensions are on the way: a fragrance, a deal with Pontiac, vitamin supplements and a book with Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power. "It's called the 50th Law," the rapper says, "and it's about the environment I grew up in and how it relates to corporate America."

Recently, however, some numbers haven't been adding up for 50. "Straight to the Bank" and "Amusement Park," the first two singles from his current project, were duds, a reality that was reflected in the songs' lackluster radio spins and repeated Internet lashings. The hours he has spent on YouTube, scrolling through viewers' comments about his singles, have proved to be both a combination of market research and personal obsession. "I sit there all day," he says. "And they put these fake names up there. I wish I could find these guys so I could kick their ass."