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Twenty-five years later, 50 Cent is still unpacking the day that nearly ended everything and, in a twisted way, gave him the clarity to rewrite his legacy.
On Fox & Friends this week, the Queens rapper reflected on the 2000 shooting outside his grandmother’s home — nine bullets that tore through his hand, arm, legs, chest, and face. One shattered his jaw, permanently altering his voice into the unmistakable slur that would carry across his multi-platinum debut, Get Rich or Die Tryin’.
“It shifted my concept,” he said on the morning show. “My first album concept was Power of a Dollar, and then I went to Get Rich or Die Tryin’. The stakes just got higher.”
At the time, music wasn’t even on his radar. “I wasn’t thinking about a CD,” 50 admitted. “As soon as you feel fine, the doctors are telling you you’re fine, you’re going to recover and you look and you go, ‘Whoa, what am I going to do?’ The record company is not answering the phone anymore… everything is changing, and then it’s like you got to figure out how to do it on your own.”
Dropped from Columbia Records in the aftermath, 50 had to hustle his way back. With no streaming platforms, he relied on a gritty, DIY system: slipping his music to bootleggers, knowing they’d push it through the underground. “We were in a different climate,” he said. “I couldn’t do what new artists do now, just record and upload to YouTube. I had to trick bootleggers into thinking they were stealing it so they’d reproduce it and get it out.”
That strategy — and that trauma — fueled Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the 2003 album that turned his survival story into a cultural reset. “Many Men (Wish Death on Me)” doubled as both a diary entry and a war cry, cementing 50’s place in rap’s mythology.
The shooting, still believed to be tied to Queens drug lord Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff, remains unsolved. But for 50, it was less about revenge and more about rebirth. “There are no excuses,” he told the audience. “There’s no situation that they’ll go through, or that they can’t go through, and still be successful.”
From near-death in Jamaica, Queens to rap mogul and television powerhouse, 50 Cent turned one of his darkest chapters into the foundation of his empire.
