Rapper 50 Cent negotiated a minority equity stake in Glaceau, the parent company of Vitamin Water, in exchange for endorsing the beverage back in 2004 instead of just taking a standard upfront cash fee.

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Rapper 50 Cent negotiated a minority equity stake in Glaceau, the parent company of Vitamin Water, in exchange for endorsing the beverage back in 2004 instead of just taking a standard upfront cash fee. When Coca-Cola purchased the company for four point one billion dollars three years later, his brilliant equity play reportedly netted him an estimated one hundred million dollars in a single day. He made substantially more money investing in sugar water aggressively marketed as health food than he ever did selling platinum rap albums. It highlights a bleak economic truth that creating generational art is a terrible financial strategy compared to securing stock options in the wildly unregulated American beverage industry