Homes have always been a source of inspiration for me. Both of my parents had been involved in real estate and passed down the importance of ownership and equity to my sister and me. They didn’t believe in putting their savings in the stock market. They wanted to be able to touch their money. My daddy used to tell me that you haven’t done your job as a man until you can provide a home for your family.
Back when Jabbar and I used to traffic work to Atlanta I would always have him take me by the Holyfield estate before we headed home. 794 Evander Holyfield Highway in Fayetteville, Georgia. We’d pull over to the side of the road, smoke half a joint and just take it all in.
Lord have mercy.
Villa Vittoriosa. “The Victory.” I’d first seen the property featured on an episode of ESPN’s Sportscenter. The former heavyweight champ had just had it built, and it was a sight to behold. A 45,000-square-foot mansion on a sprawling 105 acres.
The place had everything. Twelve bedrooms. Twenty-one bathrooms. A dining room that could fit one hundred guests. A movie theater. A bowling alley. An indoor basketball court. A tennis court. A softball field. A seven-stall horse barn. Behind the house was the largest residential swimming pool in the United States. Of course it had an indoor pool as well.
In 2006, right after Port of Miami went Gold, I bought my first million-dollar crib a mile away from the estate. So I would always ride by and admire the Holyfield house just like I used to back in ’96. Then one day, in the fall of 2013, I saw a For Sale sign on the gate. I immediately called the phone number on the listing.
Evander Holyfield’s property had gone into foreclosure and was now owned by JPMorgan Chase & Company. It was another sad story in boxing’s history of former greats gone broke. Joe Louis died penniless and addicted to drugs. Leon Spinks went from beating Muhammad Ali in the Las Vegas Hilton to cleaning toilets at a YMCA in Nebraska. Mike Tyson made $300 million over the course of his career and went bankrupt. And Holyfield couldn’t keep up with his child support payments for his twelve kids and six baby mothers.
Everybody was warning me about the costs of maintaining a place like this. They said the upkeep cost more than a million dollars annually. Christmas lights alone ran up a $17,000 electric bill. But I had to have this house. It felt like my destiny.
I’d sell my home in Seven Isles if that’s what it took. I’d paid $5,000,000 for a three-story mansion with eight bedrooms, a movie theater, an arcade and a gym. It was right on the water and I had a ninety-foot yacht named Rich Forever floating out back. That place was incredible. But it wasn’t the Holyfield house.
This home was a symbol of possibility. The place I used to dream of when I had nothing could now be mine. And it wouldn’t just be mine. This would be something that belonged to my entire family that they could enjoy and be proud of. Somewhere my kids could bring all their friends and cousins and have the time of their lives.
I was still on the fence about purchasing the property until I had the opportunity to meet the honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan that November. Farrakhan invited me to his farm in Michigan, where he spoke to me about the importance of owning land and how prior to integration black folks had owned lots of it. He talked about how in the pursuit of wanting to share toilets with white people and patronize their businesses we neglected and lost our own.
From the outside looking in, buying the Holyfield house seemed reckless. But for $5.8 million it was really a steal. I don’t know how much Holyfield spent building the estate but now he was in the hole for $14 million. When the bank bought the property they initially listed it for $8.2 million. I was going to make a decent profit if I sold the Seven Isles crib. More than enough to cover buying this one.
I knew I wouldn’t suffer the same fate as Holyfield. The reality was I’d been smart with my money. I am no genius but I do make genius moves. One of my smartest ones was empowering my momma and sister to oversee my investments outside of music. Both of them were always somewhat involved with managing my finances behind the scenes but when Renee quit her day job and started working for me full-time the money really started piling up.
Any company I was going to partner with had to be a business that I loved personally. It had to be something I would want to represent in my music and feel comfortable supporting in everything I did. Wingstop fit the bill. I had been a longtime consumer of their lemon pepper wings—all flats, of course—and I liked their difference from its competitors. At Hooters your money is going toward the flat-screen TVs and the waitresses’ boob jobs. At Wingstop, you pay for the wings. I opened the doors to my first franchise in Memphis in 2011. Three years later I owned nine locations, with plans to triple that number in the coming years.
Renee and I had our sights set on buying the Checkers in Carol City next. When I was thirteen working at the car wash, a Checkers stood on the other side of the street. There was a McDonald’s directly next to the car wash but a Big Buford was a little cheaper than a Big Mac. I was only making $30 a day plus tips so the small difference in price made a big difference to me. It was worth taking the walk across the street. Then when I was in high school Checkers was the place where my football team would go to celebrate after we beat some other school’s ass. This was another local business I had a personal connection to and felt positive about getting behind.
Then I had my ownership stake in Luc Belaire. Luc Belaire was a French sparkling rosé brand owned and operated by Brett Berish, the founder and CEO of a wine and spirits business named Sovereign Brands. Sovereign Brands was the parent company of Armand de Brignac, a $300-per-bottle champagne known within the culture as Ace of Spades. Jay-Z, who’d had a stake in Ace of Spades since it was first introduced in 2006, was about to buy out Berish and take complete ownership of the brand.
I had so much respect for Hov for that play and the whole backstory behind it. It started back when all rappers were popping bottles of Cristal in their music videos. A reporter had asked the company’s director how he felt about the hip-hop community embracing the brand.
“What can we do?” he said. “We can’t forbid people from buying it.”
Hip-hop had been responsible for millions and millions of dollars of revenue for this company and that was the thanks we got. Jay-Z pulled every bottle of Cris off the shelves at his 40/40 Club and called for a boycott of the brand. Then he went into business with Brett Berish and Ace of Spades was born. So when an opportunity presented itself for me to partner with Brett and get involved in his newest venture, Luc Belaire, I didn’t need much convincing. And it took off. Today it’s the top-selling French sparkling wine in the United States.
My success in life, whether it be in music or business, is not a product of me making one flawless chess move after another. I didn’t get to where I am because I never took a loss. It took ten years before people embraced my music. I couldn’t close the deal on every artist I wanted to sign to MMG and not every artist I did sign took off. Not every Wingstop location moved chickens the way I needed it to. I lost an endorsement deal with Reebok that year over a lyric about slipping a girl a molly in a song called “U.O.E.N.O.” A few years later I received similar backlash over a comment I made about not signing female rappers to MMG because I would want to sleep with them.
I try not to entertain the Twitter mob and gossip blogs. I learned from the CO controversy that the media is more interested in creating controversy than the truth. It doesn’t take much research to see that I’ve worked alongside female artists my entire career. Or that my mother and sister are the backbone of my empire. But some people would rather blow up one distasteful lyric or an off-handed joke in a radio interview and make me out to be someone I’m not.
Let’s keep it real for a second. This is Ricky Rozay. You came to hear some real gangsta shit, right? Saying some fucked-up shit goes with the territory. My music paints a picture of a certain kind of environment. If you’re going to get up in arms over every foul lyric you might want to consider a different genre. I can own up to crossing the line and saying something regrettable from time to time but give me a break with the pearl clutching. At the end of the day my actions are what define me. I can stand by those.
Let me get back to what I was saying. I have taken my share of losses. There have been plenty. But I never let them break me. When you are chasing a dream you most definitely will be challenged. You are going to fuck things up so bad and everybody and their momma are going to tell you to quit. Success comes from saying “Fuck it. I ain’t through just yet” and then giving it another go. Resiliency is what breeds success.
As I was closing on the Holyfield House I was putting the finishing touches on Mastermind. The title for my sixth album had come from conversations I’d been having about Napoleon Hill’s Mastermind Principle. Jabbar had put me onto Hill’s book The Law of Success, one of the books he’d read while he was locked up. Jabbar had just come home from his second trip to the feds. He had been home for two years after serving the ten year sentence he caught in ’98 before he caught another case out of Arizona. I prayed this time my homie was home for good.
I set the stage for Mastermind with my sixth collaboration with Jay-Z, “The Devil Is a Lie.” Originally I’d wanted to get Hov on another beat, a record produced by Boi1da and Vinlyz that’s now known as “FuckWithMeYouKnowIGotIt.” But when Jay heard the beat he liked it so much he wanted to keep it for himself. Hov was working on his first solo album in four years—Magna Carta Holy Grail—and he had blessed me with so many timeless verses over the years I had to let him have it. Honestly I was excited to finally get a placement on one of his albums. Of course he returned the favor tenfold with “The Devil Is a Lie.”
I had to pull a similar move to get “Mafia Music III” on Mastermind. That was a joint I initially wrote for Dr. Dre while he was working on Detox. I wrote verses for him and myself and the rumor was Dre was going to get Rihanna to do the hook. But the other rumor I was hearing was that Detox was never coming out.
Khaled and I are fans of island music and we were stuck on this joint. If Dre wasn’t doing anything with it then I had to have it for Mastermind. I wanted to double down on the beat’s dancehall vibes and get some real Jamaican artists—Mavado and Sizzla—on there. Khaled hit Bink!, the beat’s producer, who got the green light from Dr. Dre for me to keep “Mafia Music III.”
Puff was the final piece of the Mastermind puzzle. Two weeks before the album was due I visited the big homie at his crib on Star Island. I needed to get him to sign off on “Nobody.” “Nobody” was a remake of “You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You),” the ominous outro to Biggie’s final album, Life After Death. The idea for the song came about during a studio session with French Montana. I’d wanted to touch on the recent attempts on my life but I couldn’t address it directly. I knew too much. I wanted to come at it ambiguously like how you never knew for sure if Big was talking about Tupac on the record.
I’d already reached out to D-Roc, Big’s right-hand man who was in the car with him the night he got killed. He gave me his blessing. Now I needed two things from Puff. The first was sample clearance. I wasn’t worried about that part. I knew Puff was going to love what I did on there. The second thing I wasn’t so sure of. One of Puff’s employees from Revolt had slipped me this recording of Puff blacking out on one of his artists during a session.
“You fuckin’ wanna walk around with these niggas... Where the fuck is their culture? Where the fuck is their souls at? What defines you? These niggas with these fucking silly looks on their faces... YOU WANNA WALK AROUND WITH THEM OR YOU WANNA WALK WITH GOD, NIGGA?! MAKE UP YOUR GODDAMN MIND!”
Puff is known for his classic rants but this one was up there with the all-time greats. I wanted to use it on the song. I assured Puff I’d keep the identity of the person on the receiving end of it a secret and Puff gave me the thumbs-up. He knew the people needed to hear him talk that talk.
After listening to Mastermind a few times I asked Puff what he thought was still missing. He told me all the pieces of a classic album were already there. I just needed to make it all one piece. Mastermind needed to feel like it was all recorded in the same booth on the same day. As if me, Hov, Kanye, Lil Wayne, The Weeknd and everyone else involved had been in the studio together drinking and smoking while we made it. The way that albums were made in the ’90s. There was only one person with the expertise and experience to get me there. I asked Puff to come on board as executive producer and help me bring the album home.
All of my prior albums had been mixed and mastered in a couple of hours. Puff’s process took several days. I learned a lot watching him mix Mastermind. I had always been meticulous when it came to my music but I would perfect it on a song-by-song basis. Puff took a bird’s-eye view of Mastermind. It wasn’t enough for Mike Will Made It’s high hats, snares and kicks to hit hard on “War Ready.” They needed to hit the same as every other producers’ on the album.
Mastermind came out dope and delivered numbers-wise. Between the shooting on my birthday and me getting dropped by Reebok, 2013 had been a little rocky but I felt like things were getting back on track. But there were more storms coming and my resiliency would soon be put to the test.
On June 21, 2014, I was scheduled to perform at Hot 107.5’s Summer Jamz festival in Detroit. But when we pulled up to the venue the gates were padlocked and there were a lot of niggas standing around. The show promoter spoke to Pucci, who was in the car in front of me. After a brief exchange Pucci called our car and said that we were going back to the casino to hang out while the promoter sorted out some issue. We left and I didn’t think much of the situation until we got to the casino and I saw the conversation that was happening on Twitter.
It turned out a local rapper named Trick Trick had come to Chene Park with a hundred of his goons to prevent me from performing. Trick Trick had declared Detroit was a “No Fly Zone,” meaning out-of-towners had to check in with him if they wanted to perform in his city. Trick Trick was not known for his music but he did have a reputation for doing sucker shit like this. He jumped Trick Daddy back in the day for “stealing his name” and beat him damn near to death. As if anyone even knew who Trick Trick was. Trick Trick must have missed the memo that I didn’t do check-ins. What I didn’t understand was why he turned us away if he wanted a confrontation. If you’re from the jungle you don’t lock the lions out. You let them in!
When Trick Trick got asked what the problem was he said that it was between him and me, but there was nothing between him and me. I wasn’t sure if he was looking for a handout or just some attention but he wasn’t getting either. I didn’t feel the need to shoot my way into a venue to perform but I felt bad for all the kids who came out to see me that night. Those were the people that lost out.
Before I could get to the bottom of whatever this loser was upset about I had a real problem on my hands. Meek got sentenced to three to six months in prison for violating the terms of his probation. Genece Brinkley, the judge who had been obsessed with him since he caught his case in ’08, claimed that Meek had violated the terms of his probation by not getting her permission to travel out of town for a show. That may have been true but the punishment seemed excessive.
It was terrible timing. Meek’s sophomore album, Dreams Worth More than Money, was scheduled to come out in September. That wasn’t going to happen now. Wale was still working on his album and I knew he wasn’t going to rush his process to make up for Meek’s shortcoming. The two of them were not on good terms. Days earlier a personal dispute between Meek and Wale had spilled over onto social media. It wasn’t anything serious. Just a quarrel between two passionate artists and brothers. But of course the blogs were having a field day with the story and it didn’t reflect well on my label.
Losing Meek’s release date was one of the factors that led to me putting out two albums in the span of eight months. I’d never released two albums in one calendar year before but at the time I felt like the team needed to put some numbers on the board in what was shaping up to be an off year.
Hood Billionaire was some hard Geechi shit with a lot of good ideas. Much of the album was inspired by my love for the city of Memphis. I’d spent a lot of time there that summer opening up my latest Wingstop locations. I’d even gotten a key to the city from Mayor A.C. Wharton for bringing so many jobs to the community. The album’s first single, “Elvis Presley Boulevard,” was my ode to the birthplace of rock and roll and I featured the North Memphis legend Project Pat on there. Other Memphis artists like Yo Gotti and K. Michelle were on the album too.
The other element of Hood Billionaire was my reunion with an old friend. Kenneth “Boobie” Williams. Boobie and I had stayed in touch ever since he got locked up but this was the first time he allowed me to feature him in my music. Boobie called in from USP McCreary in Kentucky, where he’s serving life, and my engineer E-Mix recorded the conversation so we could have snippets of it interspersed throughout the album.
There were dope records on Hood Billionaire. The problem was I didn’t take the time to go through it with a fine-tooth comb the way I usually do. Take “Movin’ Bass” for example. “Movin’ Bass” was a record Jay-Z and I had worked on the same day we did “FuckWithMeYouKnowIGotIt” in New York. Hov did a hook during the session but he didn’t get to a verse. We just had him mumbling a freestyle over the beat before we ended up having to part ways.
The turnaround for Hood Billionaire was so tight that we weren’t able to properly revisit the song. But I wanted to do something with the record. Hov gave us the green light to use his hook but not any of his unfinished verse.
The record still sounded dope and I probably could have gotten away with having half of a Jay-Z feature if it weren’t for Timbaland. Timbaland had been in the studio that day and had the files from the session. He went and leaked a version of the song that included Hov’s unauthorized vocals and put one of his artists on there before my album even came out. It made it seem like his was the real version of the song and mine was a knockoff. I was so pissed at Timbaland for doing that shit.
When Hood Billionaire came out people could tell it had been somewhat of a rush job. It sold half as many copies as Mastermind. My money was at an all-time high so that wasn’t what I cared about. I just didn’t like that I’d let my fans down.
Mr. Ross is trying hard to find new ways to present himself, making this an ambitious album, but not always one with the right ambition.
—The New York Times
Ross’ commercial interests, from Maybach Music to Wingstop, are so fundamental to his identity (and lyrics and social media presence) it’s tough to see him removing himself from the business mindset of pushing out as much content as possible... He could benefit from taking a step back and focusing on quality over quantity. For now, Hood Billionaire is a half-baked testament to how difficult it is to make great records in rapid succession.
—Consequence of Sound
It’s sonically interesting at times on headphones and undoubtedly sounds fine on warm open roads, but these are things you could say about any Rick Ross release. Without any truly standout tracks, it’s easy to call Hood Billionaire unnecessary.
—Pop Matters
Between in-fighting within my label, Meek getting locked up, and now the first commercial and critical dud of my career, 2014 was not the return to form I’d been planning on. And MMG wasn’t looking like the untouchable empire that I claimed it to be. I was out here looking weak.