50 Cent Speaks On Promoting "Conscious Capitalism"

50 Cent reveals the names of the artists he's worked with for free, says it was more so about the art than the money.

Queens rapper 50 Cent’s conversation with Nick Huff Barili during their SXSW interview series quickly turned into a discussion on capitalism, specifically conscious capitalism, in the series' latest installment.

50 Cent, who has gone on to make quite the impact in the business world thanks to deals with Vitaminwater and SMS Audio, addressed the effect big business could have on the world’s poverty. The rapper turned businessman even spoke on his desire to promote conscious capitalism, a form of business that takes environemental and social issues into consideration, with his various business ventures.

“According to World Bank numbers, 10 percent of business would alleviate all [the strain] of poverty,” 50 Cent revealed. “The only place you would find that much money is in business itself. So, I decided to promote conscious capitalism at that point and I said I want my ventures moving forward to have automatic—it’s like creating a business that you have a partner that doesn’t exist, but that partner is an actual cause. It’s against hunger, hunger’s not a third-world issue. It’s a world issue. Within America you have one in six American’s going hungry. You got kids out there that’s surviving based on school lunch.”

50 Cent later spoke on a few of his unexpected musical collaborations and shared that a handful of those collabs, including ones with R&B singer Jeremih and rapper YG were done for free due to a lack of budget.

“I work with artists on a song by song basis. Because I’m in a position where I’m not having a problem financially I can decide to do it just based on the art and the music,” he explained. “So, you’ll see me do and it’ll be strange. I’ll work with an artist on their first song. Like ‘Toot It And Boot It’ with YG, or ‘Buzzin’ with Mann, or I did ‘Down On Me’ with Jeremih. Those records were for free. They didn’t have it in the budget to pay what I would charge.”