Cash Flow

The story of how Jay-Z acquired that fortune ? as the subtitle says, making the move ?from street corner to corner office? ? is well told in Zack O?Malley Greenburg?s slender but entertaining Empire State of Mind. Tales of how artists rose from difficult backgrounds to stardom are familiar, as are accounts of how entrepreneurs built business empires from nothing. What is striking about the Jay-Z saga is that it is both. A teenager growing up with an absent father in a tough New York housing estate in the 1980s, Shawn Carter, as he was born, became a crack dealer and continued selling even as he tried to get his music career off the ground in the early 1990s. (His performing name comes from the intersection of the J and Z subway lines near the Marcy Houses ? typically dour, brown New York public housing in six-storey apartment buildings ? where he grew up.) Today, as O?Malley Greenburg puts it, ?As much as Martha Stewart or Oprah [Winfrey], he has turned himself into a lifestyle.? Jay-Z?s personal brand has been extended to clothes, shoes, cologne, Manhattan?s Spotted Pig restaurant and the New Jersey Nets basketball team, through licensing deals and shareholdings. The common thread is that ?Jay-Z has a nose for money?. In whatever form his entrepreneurship has manifested itself, as a crack dealer, a rapper or an executive, he has had an acute sense of commercial opportunities, and the determination to exploit them to the full.

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