Jeezy believes he’d be topping the Forbes list alongside JAY-Z and Dr. Dre year after year if he’d made the shift into business earlier in his career.
The Atlanta native appeared as a guest on an episode of The Adversity Advantage Podcast published on Monday (February 12), where he spoke in depth about his beginnings as a hustler and transitioning into being a rapper.
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While he admitted that his street-minded way of moving stalled him in the beginning, Jeezy is confident that he will eventually catch up to his peers when it comes to business moves.
“I had my stints of when I first came up in the music game, I wanted to still live a certain type of way because that’s what I felt like was going to get me to the next level,” he said. “There was a period of my life, around the time I was probably depressed, that I was doing a lot of things that didn’t financially make sense in the beginning because now you’re trying to live up to this stereotype that you built.
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“I think if I took that time knowing what I know and strategically went into business even earlier, I would be where a lot of my other peers are at right at now. I’m still gon’ there but you think about the Dr. Dres and the JAY-Zs and all that, it’s just like they got the game earlier. And I just think it took me a long time to get the game because I wasn’t in those type of rooms, because the difference between me and them is I came with a lot of gangsta shit.”
He concluded: “Nobody really about business wanna be around that. You come to a meeting with 100 people, it don’t make sense, but I thought that was the way to go.”
The conversation starts around the 14:50 mark in the clip below:
In the fall, Jeezy revealed that it was actually JAY-Z himself that convinced him to take the financial side of rapping seriously.
“You got to talk to John Plant over at Warner because he was the first person that gave me a check for publishing,” he explained on the Assets Over Liabilities show. “I ain’t cash the check for like a year-and-a-half. He called me like, ‘What’s going on with the check I gave you?’ ‘I’ma keep it real with you I left it in some pants and I think it got faded and I don’t know where it’s at.'”
Jeezy confirmed the lucrative check was for a few million dollars but he didn’t need the cash at the time.
“JAY-Z called me like, ‘Yo, you gotta quit playing.’ I was like, ‘Alright, I gotta,'” he recalled. “Not at the time, when I came in from the streets to music I was good. I was straight. The music, to me, I was more infatuated that people liked what I was doing.
“I didn’t need the money, so I thought. I just had the bread. Then I was getting money for shows, it was like taking ice cream from a baby. It was the sweetest shit ever.”
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Jeezy continued: “When Def Jam gave me my check, I didn’t have an account. Shoebox, I was just putting checks in the box. I didn’t understand how it worked. I was too embarrassed to ask… By the way, I was paranoid of banks. The first thing I’m thinking is it gon’ be money laundering.”
He eventually got the hang of his finances and said he’s gotten “pretty good” overlooking his finances, explaining that he never turned to an account or money manager for help.
