In January, an early candidate for one of the year’s best stories broke: In 2014, when 50 Cent released his album Animal Ambition, he accepted the then-fledgling Bitcoin as a payment method and then forgot about his haul for years. The Bitcoin he earned from that move reportedly earned him about 7 million dollars, which is a pretty big chunk of change to forget about.
It turns out that the only thing 50 Cent forgot about, though, was honesty. The Fader notes that new filings were made in bankruptcy court to refute allegations that 50 Cent didn’t properly disclose all of his assets, including his supposed Bitcoin trove, and they say that he “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.”
Instead of hanging onto the Bitcoin for years, the virtual currency was converted to U.S. dollars pretty quickly after payment was received. For his part, 50 Cent said that he didn’t shut down the false narrative that he was a Bitcoin millionaire because he liked the story:
“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.”
Not only did he not deny the story, but he went along with it: “Not bad for a kid from South Side, I’m so proud of me,” he wrote on Instagram, and added lated, “I’m a keep it real. I forgot I did that sh-t.”
