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Billionaire Jay-Z’s Net Worth Jumps 40% With Sales Of Streaming Service Tidal, Champagne Brand

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Over the past two weeks, the rapper struck deals to sell his boutique music streaming service and half of his champagne brand Armand de Brignac, adding an enormous pile of cash to his already massive fortune.

“Hip-hop from the beginning has always been aspirational,” Jay-Z said in 2010 when Forbes got a ringside seat to the rapper’s first meeting in Omaha with billionaire investor Warren Buffett. “It always broke that notion that an artist can’t think about money as well.”

More than a decade later, the rapper-turned-billionaire is showing exactly what he means: In his second major deal in as many weeks, Jay-Z inked a deal to sell  a majority stake in music streaming company Tidal to Jack Dorsey’s mobile payment company Square for $297 million. The transaction valued the company at about $450 million—$150 million more than Forbes’ 2019 estimate. Forbes figures he netted out $149 million in cash and stock—and got a board seat—after buying back 33% of Tidal from T-Mobile earlier this week and then selling that and the third he already owned. Tidal’s “artist shareholders” will continue to have a stake in the company, and Jay-Z will own a small percentage, as well.

This comes a week after he sold half of his Armand de Brignac champagne to LVMH in a deal that valued the luxury liquor company at about $640 million.

The two deals helped lift the fortune of hip-hop’s first billionaire to $1.4 billion, up from $1 billion.

It’s just the start.  His diverse and growing business includes the remaining 50% stake in the $300-per-bottle Armand de Brignac, as well as D’Usse cognac and a collection of less-sexy startups including insurance startup Ethos and salad chain Sweetgreen. He also owns a chunk of his own music, shares multiple multi-million dollar mansions with his wife Beyoncé and has a growing art collection.

In 2005 he laid down the now prophetic lyric, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”

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