50 Cent has shared the advice he gave Drake during the rapper’s feud with Kendrick Lamar.
In a recent interview with Billboard, the 49-year-old rapper revealed he imparted wisdom on the “Hotline Bling” artist amid his infamous rap beef with Lamar earlier this year. While Drake – real name Aubrey Graham – and Lamar have taken shots at each other over the years, their heated battle came to a head in May 2024 when the Compton native dropped his song, “Not Like Us.”
Lamar’s diss track racked up more than 10 million views on YouTube in a matter of hours, becoming the fastest hip-hop song to reach 300 million streams on Spotify. The “Humble” rapper was seemingly declared winner of the rap battle when he was announced the headliner for the 2025 Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime show.
While many fans deemed Lamar the winner, 50 Cent told the Toronto artist not to listen to the haters.
“I was telling him, it’s not him. I’m listening on the outskirts, it’s not you. Don’t let yourself think that for a second,” he recalled to Billboard. “On some real s***, I said, ‘They said you lost, okay. Well what did you lose?’ What exactly did he lose if he got $300-something-million on his last tour? You didn’t lose a motherf***ing thing, man.”
He continued: “If that’s the moment, you keep your creative energy in the right place, and keep creating. If you slow down because you feel, ‘What the f***?’ The resistance will make you feel like your material isn’t good. Then you gotta figure out how to keep pushing, how to keep creating – because that’s what it feels like to you at the moment. That s*** was good for hip-hop. It made both of them create quality material faster.”
50 Cent, real name Curtis James Jackson III, went on to applaud Drake for his creativity throughout the rap battle, such as releasing a music video for his diss track, “Family Matters.” The music video featured a clip of a 1996 Chrysler Town and Country minivan being demolished, the same car featured on the cover of Lamar’s 2012 album, good kid, m.A.A.d city.
“The f***ing car in the video. That s*** was a mystery. Everything was tied to something. I was like what the f***? That wasn’t in hip-hop before that,” he said. “Before that battle, I do not remember this was the car from this and that was this. Everything that was a part of it was some other s***. It was almost encrypted.”
50 Cent recently reflected on his vocal criticisms of disgraced music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs. The “In Da Club” rapper has been an outspoken critic of Combs long before he was charged with sex trafficking and racketeering earlier this year.
“Look, it seems like I’m doing some extremely outrageous things, but I haven’t. It’s really me just saying what I’ve been saying for 10 years,” he told People in an interview published October 21. “Now it’s becoming more full-facing in the news with the Puffy stuff, but away from that, I’m like, ‘Yo, it’s just my perspective because I stayed away from that stuff the entire time, because this is not my style.’”
Combs has also been accused of rape and sexual abuse in at least nine civil lawsuits this past year. The music mogul has continued to plead not guilty to charges of racketeering, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution for allegedly running a decades-long “criminal enterprise” that forced women into sex acts.
His attorney, Marc Agnifilo, has denied any allegations of wrongdoing, claiming his client is “an innocent man with nothing to hide.”
“Mr Combs is a fighter, he’s going to fight this to the end,” Agnifilo said.
