Jay-Z Explains Why His Celebrity Status Isn’t Enough To Run A Billion-Dollar Empire
Jay-Z Explains Why His Celebrity Status Isn’t Enough To Run A Billion-Dollar Empire! Billionaire rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z who recently grew his net worth by a whopping 40 percent to $1.4 billion after Tidal & Champagne Brand Sales has now revealed that his celebrity status alone isn’t enough to run a multi-billion business empire.
While appearing on a recent interview with South China Morning Post, the Hip Hop mogul was humble with regard to his success giving credit to Dorsey and Philippe Schaus, the CEO of LVMH who acquired a 50% stake in Jay-Z’s Armand de Brignac champagne brand.
“I’m very fortunate,” said the rapper. “Jack Dorsey, who created Twitter, Square and Cash App, and Philippe [Schaus] and the guys who created LVMH – you couldn’t ask for better partners; they’re the top of the top. [Things] usually align like that when people do really great things. You could get into partnerships and people short-change the business for different reasons. These guys don’t cut corners, they try to get it right. It’s about respect.”
The champagne brand also known as ‘Ace of Spades’ was founded back in 2006 managing to sell over 500,000 bottles in 2019.
“We ran this brand from the office with eight or nine people, a really small, scrappy group,” Jay explained. “We became very successful and we’ve always looked at LVMH as the pinnacle of what we represent, a group that creates things based on their love of luxury, of getting the details perfectly correct. If I’m going to be in a partnership, especially with a brand that’s so successful, it has to enhance the brand, it can’t hinder it.”
Jay-Z continued, “This isn’t a celebrity brand, it’s a luxury brand. It’s a brand to be taken seriously and it’s not a rapper’s brand. [There was an element of] fighting against that, the weight of your own celebrity. While celebrity is not all bad, in that it can bring a new customer to something they otherwise [wouldn’t have experienced], it has to be – like everything else in the world – balanced.”
Elaborating on Hip Hop and champagne’s contrasting worlds, the hip-hop mogul made a comparison between the crossover to the hip hop’s relationship with graffiti.
“Just like with Hip Hop and graffiti, for example, we took it outside the art galleries, and people were upset, but we were expressing ourselves,” he said. “We’ve seen it time and time again, that when two worlds respect each other and what each individual or group brings to the table, it can be a beautiful thing.
“There are things that we’ve done that are not typically by the books. And you can look at that in two ways – you can look down on it, or you can say, ‘Wait, that’s interesting.’”
