Curtis James Jackson III was struck by nine bullets at close range on the 24th of May 2000, yet he survived to tell the tale. The shooting occurred outside his grandmother's former home in South Jamaica, Queens, when an assailant fired a 9mm handgun into his hand, arm, hip, both legs, chest, and left cheek. The attack left him with a swollen tongue, the loss of a wisdom tooth, and a permanently slurred voice, but it also forged the core of his public persona. He spent 13 days in the hospital and used a walker for six weeks before fully recovering after five months. The alleged attacker, Darryl Baum, known as Homicide, was killed three weeks later, leaving the motive behind the shooting a mystery that Jackson himself has never fully solved. He later wrote in his autobiography that surviving the attack made him believe he had a specific purpose in life, asking himself how much more damage a single shell could have done if it had hit him an inch in another direction. This near-death experience became the catalyst for his transition from a street dealer to a global music icon, transforming a moment of extreme violence into a narrative of survival and destiny.
From Crack To The Charts
Jackson began selling crack cocaine during primary school, bringing guns and drug money to Andrew Jackson High School before his arrest on the 29th of June 1994 for selling four vials of cocaine to an undercover officer. He was arrested again three weeks later when police found heroin and ten ounces of crack cocaine at his home, resulting in a sentence of three to nine years which he served six months of in a boot camp where he earned his GED. He adopted the nickname 50 Cent as a metaphor for change, inspired by Kelvin Martin, a 1980s Brooklyn robber known as 50 Cent, stating that the name represented his willingness to provide for himself by any means. After his mother, Sabrina, died in a fire when he was eight years old, he was raised by his grandparents and began boxing at age 11. He started rapping in a friend's basement in 1996, learning to count bars and structure songs from Jam Master Jay of Run-DMC. His early mixtapes, including Guess Who's Back? released in 2002, were discovered by Eminem, who signed him to Shady Records. This partnership led to the release of Get Rich or Die Tryin' in February 2003, which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and sold 872,000 copies in its first four days, spawning the number-one singles In da Club and 21 Questions.The Business Of G-Unit
Jackson launched G-Unit Records in 2003, signing fellow East Coast rappers Lloyd Banks and Tony Yayo as initial members, and later adding Young Buck and The Game. The label replaced his previous imprint, Rotten Apple Entertainment, and secured a distribution deal with Interscope Records. His second album, The Massacre, released in 2005, sold 1.14 million copies in its first four days, making him the first solo artist to have three singles in the Billboard top five in the same week with Candy Shop, Disco Inferno, and How We Do. Beyond music, Jackson built a diversified business empire, including a partnership with Glacéau to create Formula 50, a grape-flavored variant of VitaminWater. When Coca-Cola purchased Glacéau for 4.1 billion dollars in 2007, Jackson, as a minority shareholder, earned 100 million dollars after taxes. He also founded SMS Audio, a consumer electronics company selling headphones, and invested in Effen Vodka, becoming a minority shareholder in 2014. His ventures extended to real estate, boxing promotion through TMT Promotions, and mining heavy metals in South Africa, where he met billionaire Patrice Motsepe to discuss purchasing an equity stake in a platinum, palladium, and iridium mine.