Empire State of Mind

Not all of Jay-Z’s ventures have gone perfectly. His entrepreneurial wastepaper basket is filled with scuttled plans for a Jay-Z Jeep, a failed Las Vegas nightclub, and an aborted casino and racetrack project in New York.¹ But most moguls have had their share of failures, and they survive on the strength of new ideas good enough to erase the bad memories. Few will remember that Steve Jobs was once fired from Apple; instead, they’ll remember how he came back and revitalized the company he founded by creating the iPod.

Jay-Z’s business career will be known for its highlights—Live Nation, the Nets, Rocawear—and other deals he makes in the coming years. He won’t be remembered for the mentors he’s cast aside, but rather for the protégés whose careers he’s helped launch, including Kanye West, Rihanna, Rick Ross, Ne-Yo, and J. Cole. He has expanded his own musical tastes, popping up at performances by alternative groups like Muse and Grizzly Bear and even collaborating with rock acts like Santigold and Chris Martin. His 2010 album The Blueprint 3 was not only one of his most eclectic, but one of his most successful in terms of pop-culture appeal. “It’s a credit to Jay-Z’s longevity,” says Craig Kallman, chief of Atlantic Records. “The fact that he had his crowning creative achievement in terms of radio and global reach with this album is remarkable this far into his career.”²

Meanwhile, Jay-Z’s entrepreneurial impulses only seem to be growing more refined and international in scope. In 2005, he bought a large chunk of The Spotted Pig, a Michelinspangled gastro pub in the West Village.³ In 2009, he joined Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith to invest $1 million in the Tony Award-winning Broadway show Fela!⁴ The following year, Jay-Z suggested he might be interested in buying a stake in the English Premier League’s Arsenal soccer team. “I don’t know a lot about the business of soccer, but in the future if the right opportunity presented itself, then who knows?” he said. “I am a businessman, and I will always look at an opportunity.”⁵

With a personal fortune of roughly half a billion dollars and a place in hip-hop’s pantheon already secured, it would seem that Jay-Z has few reasons to keep working, let alone take on a challenge as difficult as buying a foreign soccer team. Yet he still makes new music and pursues uncharted business ventures with more rigor than ever. Some observers would point to his seemingly infinite desire for wealth and fame, spurred by the insecurity and poverty of his youth.

Jay-Z might say it’s something a bit nobler—the perfection of his legacy. He rarely waxes sentimental, but his song “History” is about as close as he gets to all-out schmaltz. After alluding to the poignant hopes of his early life (“All I got is dreams, nobody else can see / Nobody else believes, nobody else but me”), he explains his journey to the top by likening abstract concepts to fictional women. Until he finds Victory (“She keeps eluding me”), he’s stuck with Success (“She’s good to the touch, she’s good for the moment, but she’s never enough”). Once he finally wins Victory, they’ll have a child (“We’ll have a baby who stutters repeatedly, we’ll name him History”). The song’s final verse offers a compelling glimpse into the soul behind Jay-Z’s invincible exterior: “Long after I’m gone, long after I breathe / I leave all I am in the hands of History.”⁶

I’ve been sitting with DJ Clark Kent at the Applebee’s in Brooklyn for nearly three hours. The winter sun is sinking toward the snow-covered rooftops along Flatbush Avenue, and our margaritas have been reduced to puddles of ice and salt. Kent is still riffing on Jay-Z.

“I think it’s unfair to call Jay-Z a rapper,” he says. “I think rapping is something he does. When he says, ‘I’m not a businessman—I’m a business, man,’ you really have to take that seriously. He is a business, and rapping is just something that’s in his business.”⁷

“There’s people who sit around saying they want to be Bill Gates, but there’s way more people who say they want to be Jay-Z,” he muses. “They don’t know who Bill Gates is. Jay-Z’s probably sitting around going, ‘I want to be Bill Gates to the tenth power.’”

With that, Kent pulls out his BlackBerry. It’s later than he thought—time to go. He shakes my hand and scoots out of the booth. As he’s putting on his overcoat, he offers a final thought about how history will view Shawn Carter.