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August 27, 2012
Jay-Z: The Aura of Ownership
The Launch Magazine
The Launch speaks with New York Times reporter David Halbfinger about his recent article on Jay-Z's role with the Brooklyn Nets.
It seemed to be a no-brainer that Jay-Z would participate in Halbfinger’s story since they had great chemistry during their first interaction where Jay-Z actually rapped over the phone as he was finalizing the project in the recording studio. However, Jay-Z’s representatives declined an interview request and according to Halbfinger even tried to prevent the story from being published.
...That’s interesting. Maybe they were concerned you would reveal how much of the team he didn’t really own. Many people were under the impression that it was 10 percent or maybe even 5 percent.
It’s very simple. He invested $1 million and that was out of a $300 million purchase price. That’s one-third of one percent, period. End of story.
Then that percentage went even lower?
When Mikhail D. Prokhorov (the billionaire owner of the Brooklyn Nets) bought 80 percent of the team what that does is squeezes down the 100 percent of all the other people into 20 percent. Everybody who had a piece up to that point had their stake divided by five.
...You state in the piece that you gathered some information on Jay-Z from the “Empire State of Mind” book by Zack O’Malley Greenburg. What else did you use?
Yeah, I did use that book because he had a chapter in there all about that champagne. He has a pretty decent account of the major moments in Jay’s business career. But that was the only thing I directly took out of that book. I read a lot of clips and blogs. There’s a lot of stuff published by opponents and critics of the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, online in particular.
You're welcome.
Posted by eric at August 27, 2012 11:00 AM