Fat Joe's feud with Jay-Z and 50 Cent explored as rapper says he lost Reebok and Jordan sneaker deals due to their beef

Fat Joe thinks two of his prolific sneaker deals fell through because of his beef with Jay-Z and 50 Cent. During the latest episode of Sneaker Shopping with Complex’s Joe La Puma, Joe opened up about his lapsed deals with Puma and Reebok.

“I was the first rapper with a Jordan sneaker. Not only that, designed by Michael Jordan,” he said, recalling that the model was slated to be a Jordan 3 or 4.

As reported by Complex, however, Jordan allegedly backed out of working with Joe after his infamous 2005 moment with 50 Cent at the MTV VMAs. He recalled a phone call he got from a representative of the brand:

“Yo, Big Joe, you know, I'm not with controversy. Maybe we look at this in the future,” the exec told him.

Around the same time, his deal with Reebok also lapsed due to his feud with Jay-Z, he said:

“Reebok had approached me and was like, ‘Yo, we want to do a sneaker with you for millions,’” Joe recalled. “I caught the squeeze play cuz Hov was over there and 50 Cent.” However, the head of the brand called him to pull back: “He said, ‘Yo, I ain't know you not cool with Hov.’ They shut it down. They was just like, ‘Yo, we won't do business with you if you give this guy a sneaker.’ That's part of the karma. It's part of the ins and outs. I've done it to other guys. It came back to me.”

Fat Joe's years-long beef with Jay-Z and 50 Cent explored:

Fat Joe has long been involved in a feud with Jay-Z. Their feud reportedly dates back to 2004, when the hip-hop artists and basketball players would hang out at Harlem’s Rucker Park for tournaments. As reported by Hot New Hip Hop, Joe previously recounted what kick-started their beef during an episode of Untold Stories of Hip Hop:

"Jay-Z's the richest guy in the world. He got everything in the world. The one thing that I love is the Rucker," Fat Joe said. "So, one year, Jay Z decides to put a team at the Rucker. I won six championships out there. I'm 99 and one...this is my baby. I felt, why do they want to come to my park and take my little crown that I got?"

It didn’t take long for the two to begin taking shots at each other via cutthroat lyrics. Joe doubled down on his sentiments against the Roc-A-Fella co-founder on his single “Lean Back”:

“I don’t wanna speak about the Rucker/ Not even Pee Wee Kirkland could imagine this/ My n-gga didn’t have to play to win the championship,” he raps.

As reported by HipHopDx, he also opened up about his beef with Hov during an interview with Math Hoffa, where he acknowledged his role in escalating the situation:

“One of the greatest friendships, admiration and love, I played myself,” he said. “With everything that happened with us and Roc-A-Fella and all that was Fat Joe’s doing, and I played myself, and I was wrong. I wasted 10, 15 years we could have got money with each other. I ain’t going lie, ever since I started f*cking with JAY-Z, I’ve been getting paid.”

As for him and 50 Cent, the two have since mended their bond, but they had been involved in a feud since the early 2000s. As reported by Complex, one of the defining moments of their beef came in 2005, when the two took to the stage to trade insults.

At the VMAs, Fif tried to get a rise out of Fat Joe, including waving at him from the cheap seats while the latter was on stage. 50 even sauntered on stage at some points and heckled Joe when the show was live. Fat Joe eventually broke character when he said:

“‘I feel safe with all the police protection courtesy of G-Unit.’”

However, in 2012, when their mutual friend Chris Lighty died, the pair squashed their feud and reconciled. In July 2024, 50 Cent said that, in retrospect, he’d wasted too much time "arguing" with his former adversary:

"Look, I think we wasted too much time arguing, me and Fat Joe, me and Cam’ron," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "There’s other guys like Jada[kiss], we cleared it up easier. But we wasted time because it was just the competitive nature. It wasn’t like we crossed paths and had real heat for each other."

He also explained that his feud with Fat Joe ran for so long because the two are too similar:

"When we’re at odds, we are at odds, and we did that for a long time," 50 Cent said. "And because of his loyalty to Irv [Gotti] and Ja because he worked with them, I was seeing him not be happy from the things that were making me happy." He added, "It’s easy for me to say, 'F--- you,' if what makes me happy makes you unhappy, then we’re not on the same page and it turns into some s---, and I couldn’t pinpoint what exactly happened."

While he did note that there was "no altercation or no specific thing that" prompted their beef, he went on:

"Now he’s like my friend, and I don’t care that he has relationships with people that I don’t, because he’s always had those relationships."

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