The Rapper 50 Cent, Adjusted for Inflation
51 comments
·October 17, 2025lanewinfield
femiagbabiaka
You're doing a public service, thank you.
karmakaze
It would be fun to have currency conversions too.
Rochus
Where is the inflated music?
Rendello
I love it. If you track your mouse over the graph, the image of 50 Cent expands with inflation.
It reminds me of another great interactive rapper graph: "rappers, sorted by the size of their vocabulary":
defraudbah
yeah, no wonder cunninglinguist was pretty high in that list :)
mk_stjames
I would argue that valuation of '50 Cent' (real name Curtis James Jackson III) was essentially flat leading up to immediately before the release of Get Rich or Die Tryin', his debut album released February 6, 2003.
Which, undeniable, is an * all-time banger * that substantially increased the valuation of 50 Cent to something far surpassing US dollar inflation.
Seriously, go listen that that album again; total game changer. Top cut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D3crqpClPY
cma256
If you're into AI music I leave this without comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4GrSKMzQg0
mk_stjames
I was prepared to be absolutely fucking disgusted as such a comment but I.... shit. I mean... this is.... this is wild
I gotta go contemplate 'where we're at' again it seems. If that is truly a straight generative audio diffusion model.... wait, how did they get the same verse by verse chord progressions to match? this has to be professionally post-produced, right? AI models aren't able to do this end-to-end yet, right?
woah.
nly
It's remarkable how over this time frame how inflation in the UK and the USA has been so similar.
https://www.rateinflation.com/consumer-price-index/uk-histor...
https://www.rateinflation.com/consumer-price-index/usa-histo...
Both approx +110%
Yet over that time UK GDP per capita is up only 46% compared to the US which is up a massive +223%. Depressing.
CSMastermind
A currency being worth half it's value in 25 years is absurd. The US despreately needs to make it's money a stable unit of measure.
nonethewiser
In some sense it's absurd. But historically its normal.
And to be more precise, 25 years to halve is actually less inflation than the historical average of 3.29% from 1914-2025. At that rate it would take 21-22 years to halve.
Actually there is a surprisingly good trick to be able to calculate this called the rule of 72. Take the inflation percentage (2, 3 %) and divide 72 by it. Thats how many years it will take to halve. Not completing accurate but actually very close.
But yeah, inflation is a bitch over long time horizons. It makes me laugh when people say stocks are risky. Say you are 20 years old and want to save $2M USD for your retirement by 65. Expect that to be more like $470k.
mothballed
If you move to before the central bank was created in 1913, the dollar remained remarkably stable in relation, although it did oscillate, it never deviated more than 50% from the starting point until after creation of the fed.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Dollar_v...
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silisili
We tend to target 2% inflation. Half in 25 years is under 3%, so on target.
That said, I feel like this number is way off, personally, based on changes in housing and food prices between the two times.
pinkmuffinere
Why??? My (very limited) understanding is that we like a small amount of inflation, to incentivize reinvestment into the economy/R&D/etc. If there’s no inflation, you incentivize dragon-hoarding behavior
joshuamcginnis
We're $38.8 trillion in debt and still printing. https://www.usdebtclock.org/
kristofferR
Inflation is just what you want when your debt is denominated in the currency that is being inflated, though. The more inflation the cheaper the debt per dollar.
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BartjeD
That's why everyone sane is fleeing into gold and silver.
mothballed
Get a brokerage account that has a sister bank account. Put money in, buy TIPS/gold/equities, pay the 30% tax or whatever on the inflationary difference, then buy your stuff. The point is to force you into buying more stable units of account and then taxing the inflation as a "capital gain."
Pretty genius because it can be framed as taxing greedy capitalists when literally they're just taxing fractional inflation.
rx_tx
> Based on 50 Cent's name being coined
I see what they did there.
fair_enough
How many 2025 dollars will it cost me to take a nice lady to the candy shop?
nonethewiser
I wonder how the data is updated. I dont see any network calls so I guess it's provided on build. The latest datapoint is August. Do we just not have data for the last few months? I suppose you could have github action or whatever to pull in the latest and republish on change.
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t1234s
Didn't he make more money from his stake in Vitamin Water being acquired by Pepsi or CocaCola than from rap?
defraudbah
not really, he has a lot of businesses, this was one of them which turned out to be very successful. He was a very famous rapper back in the days, and he invented mixtapes :)
ops
He absolutely did not invent mixtapes.
borisjabes
2.6% per year inflation. Fed did a decent job.
null
hi, i made this. thank you for posting.
unfortunately due to the government shutdown, the BLS inflation data for September 2025 is delayed from October 15 (as it normally is) until October 24[1], so please check back then to see if he is >109 Cent.
assuming future stability, the site will automatically update on the 15th of every month.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/bls/092025-cpi-reschedule-notice.htm