Apparently the rapper had ‘forgot’ that he owned millions of dollars with of bitcoin, he then went on to brag about how he owned them. Now it appears he has done a 180 and is now denying the whole thing. So which is it 50 Cent?
As NPR’s Bill Chappell reported last month, 50 Cent had acknowledged in a reddit discussion in 2014 that he had accepted bitcoin as an official partial payment for his Animal Ambition album. Furthermore, a TMZ report did a little digging and uncovered that the estimate of the amount he received was about 700 bitcoins.
At the time of the transaction, the individual units of the digital currency would have been worth a mere few hundred dollars, compared to what it is worth today, which is around $10,000.
In an Instagram post that has since been deleted, the rapper had bragged about this discovered windfall, by saying he “forgot” that he had owned it.
Despite all this, in a bankruptcy filing late last week, lawyers who represent the rapper told the court that the recent media reports “falsely state” that he owned any bitcoin at all.
“[The] debtor has never owned, and does not now 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 present,” which the court papers said.
However, the documents state the he did in fact accept some quantity of the cryptocurrency, but a third party company got involved and dealt with the transaction and had it converted immediately into U.S. dollars.
Coindesk reports, the filing suggests that the number of bitcoin received in exchange for the album was far fewer than the 700 TMZ had reported. Based on print-outs that were included in the court papers, TechCrunch estimates that 50 Cent may have actually received only 6 or 7 bitcoins in 2014.
As part of the filing, the rapper had claimed that he did not dispute the TMZ report because as he stated. “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 favourable to my image or brand, even if that report is based on a misunderstanding of the facts or contains outright falsehoods.”
He further commented on the issue but stating. “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.