50 Cent Admits He ‘Has Never Owned, And Does Not Now Own’ Any Bitcoin

50 Cent, born Curtis James Jackson III, has declared in court that he “has never owned, and does not now own, a bitcoin account or any bitcoin.”

50 CENT ADMITS HE NEVER OWNED ANY BITCOIN

Reports emerged last month that the rapper had simply forgotten about $7 million in bitcoin that he owned when he accepted the cryptocurrency as payment for one of his recent albums, Animal Ambition. According to court documents obtained by The Blast, Jackson, 42, did accept bitcoin as payment, but that money went through a third party who then converted the amount to U.S. dollars.

At the time of the reports, the rapper said, “I’m a keep it real, I forgot I did that s–t. Lol.” Now he stated that he never actually touched the currency in his ‘Declaration on bitcoins’ that he submitted in his bankruptcy case: “All online transactions involving my brand were handled by an independently owned and operated third party, Central Nervous LLC.. the limited bitcoin transactions that occurred online were processed and converted to U.S. Dollars contemporaneously, based upon the then-existing exchange rate.”

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Jackson also provided screenshots of his BitPay account, which mostly consisted of transactions of $5.50 and $8.90. From these, it appears that the bitcoin purchases didn’t account for much of the 200,000 copies of the album sold. Reports initially said that he had accumulated nearly 700 bitcoins, but the screenshots give the impression that he only hauled in about six or seven, an equivalent of a few thousand U.S. dollars.

As for why the rapper didn’t correct the initial reports in the first place, he explained a general rule of thumb about show business that he subscribes to. “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 favorable to my image or brand, even if the report is based on a misunderstanding of the facts or contains outright falsehoods,” he explained in the court documents. “When I first became aware of the press reports on this matter, I made social media posts stating that ‘I forgot I did that’ because I had in fact forgotten I was one of the first recording artists to accept bitcoin for online transactions. I did not publicly deny the reports that I held bitcoins because the press coverage was favorable and suggested that I had made millions of dollars as a result of my good business decision to accept bitcoin payments.”