The Rapper 50 Cent, Adjusted for Inflation

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rx_tx• 9 months ago

Based on 50 Cent's name being coined

I see what they did there.

srameshc• 9 months ago

the images at the top is the best part, we get a little over 2 50 Cents. Makes it so much easier to understand inflation

Rendello3• 9 months ago

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":

https://pudding.cool/projects/vocabulary/index.html

defraudbah7• 9 months ago

yeah, no wonder cunninglinguist was pretty high in that list :)

HPsquared• 9 months ago

And "0 Cent" before June 1994 :)

codyb• 9 months ago

Using the first 35,000 words is a bit unfair for a rapper such as Lil Wayne who's been releasing work since he was 14.

Also I wonder if this is including proper nouns and other references. (I'd think it should, but it's hard to account for the fact that referencing seven different Chris's would be counted as one token used seven times. Similarly, many words have many meanings, and those are all being lumped together as well, so no accounting here can probably ever be perfect).

If you had all the lyrics for all the rappers I think I'd - aggregate word counts - combine variations - remove most commonly used words in each language (I, I'm, You, You're, etc)

Then see who came out ahead. You shouldn't get penalized for releasing more.

You could probably do a bunch of cool analysis with that data.

edit: Oh no, there's actually a Genius API isn't there. No no no no. I have no time!

Rendello3• 9 months ago

The original author was pretty clear about the limitations of his work. I certainly would like to see an updated version, so I'm glad you got nerd sniped and not me. I look forward to see your super accurate updated version in a few months ;)

giancarlostoro2• 9 months ago

Lil Wayne also has an insane amount of mixtapes and freestyles.

jihadjihad• 9 months ago

Blackalicious near the top of the pack checks out.

giancarlostoro2• 9 months ago

I'm surprised Twista isn't much higher, if you listen to his lyrics he's always busting out different words like a thesaurus (I think he's one who mentioned reading one as a kid or something?) but I guess this just means he's not released as many songs. I do like that MF Doom is listed as well, big respect to him, I never listened to him heavily.

One thing to note, you don't need every word on the planet to convey amazing lessons with lyrics, some of the more profound lyrics (I can't remember, but it certainly felt that way to me 15+ years ago) were by artists somewhere in the middle of your graph for me.

Just looked up Tech N9ne on there, really surprised he's in the middle. Immortal Technique more to the right with the list of people who really use an insane amount of words in their lyrics, not surprised honestly.

Edit: Just realized its the first 35,000 words... Man... this needs to do its best to get all of them. Unfortunately, there's songs by artists I can't find on ANY lyrics sites, so I fear this list will never be 100% but a close enough ballpark.

yunwal• 9 months ago

Would love to see playboi carti on here.

elestor• 9 months ago

NF being there right at the back needs to be shown to the NF fans

jjpones• 9 months ago

Of course that's where Busdriver would be!

1970-01-01• 9 months ago

1994? The artist 'made it' in 2003.

88 cent in 2025.

Not great, not terrible.

sgt• 9 months ago

So before 2003 he was less than 50 cent? When was he a dime?

gdsdfe• 9 months ago

I miss the era when the internet was more fun like this

CaptainOfCoit3• 9 months ago

Seems the creation date of the domain was 2025-10-08, so you're in luck, this particular fun exists and was created in this era!

mk_stjames2• 9 months ago

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

cma2562• 9 months ago

If you're into AI music I leave this without comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4GrSKMzQg0

mk_stjames2• 9 months ago

I was prepared to be absolutely fucking disgusted by 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?

qingcharles• 9 months ago

I came to post the exact same link. So instead I leave this Motown Soul version of Eminem which is equally as wild:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqH-GKVyryM

treetalker• 9 months ago

Since 50 Cent worked with Robert Greene to co-author The 50th Law, maybe now he and Peter Thiel can co-author Zero to 109 Cents.

Or, you know, something about rap and the Antichrist.

lanewinfield4• 9 months ago

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

karmakaze• 9 months ago

It would be fun to have currency conversions too.

earlyriser• 9 months ago

Conversions to Nickelback, Poundz, Los Pesos, DJ Euro and Yen.

rubyfan• 9 months ago

to Stanley Nickels and Schrute Bucks

Rochus• 9 months ago

Where is the inflated music?

jerf• 9 months ago

1. Go to, let's say, a video like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qm8PH4xAss [1] Start it playing.

2. Copy and paste this into your browser location bar: javascript:void(document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 50/prompt("Inflation-adjusted 50 Cent value:"))

3. Enter the inflation-adjusted 50 Cent value, which as we are talking about this today, is 109.

Et voila, inflation-adjusted 50 Cent music, and anyone finding this later can adjust it to their current inflation-adjusted value.

I believe there are limits on how slow the browsers will playback video. This code is not guaranteed to work past any possible hyperinflations or massive deflations that may occur in the future.

If you're curious how that may sound with a more careful job done then the browsers will do with stretching, consider Beethoven's 9th symphony stretched to 24 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSJ9Bkhb1Q4&list=PLMEcbs3sHQ... Some of you may well legitimately love this. Obviously the frequency profile of doing this to a 50 Cent piece will be quite different but it at least gives the idea.

[1]: It is sheer coincidence that this video ID ends in "Ass". This is "50 Cent - In Da Club (Official Music Video)" for those wondering.

femiagbabiaka• 9 months ago

You're doing a public service, thank you.

mckeed• 9 months ago

Curious how you set it up. Do you have to manually update it when inflation data comes out, or is it automatic?

lanewinfield4• 9 months ago

it's on a scheduled workflow with github actions that rebuilds the site on the 15th, 30 minutes after the data is released.

cron: '0 13 15 * *'

khazhoux• 9 months ago

This is a powerful visual representation. I would suggest that the impact could be even stronger if you provided side-by-side images of 50 Cent, where the second is scaled up proportionately.

brk• 9 months ago

If you scroll across it displays multiples of the image representative to the inflation at the time point.

lanewinfield4• 9 months ago

that’s a good idea. in future versions, i might need to consider multiple renderings as different economists likely prefer alternative visualizations of 50’s monetary adjustments

dsamarin• 9 months ago

Quick self nerd snipe:

I think the area should be scaled proportionally, so the new width and height should be multiplied by sqrt(cents/50)

kemiller• 9 months ago

You should extend it into the past. Hapenny hit hard.

tempestn2• 9 months ago

Love it. I think there's an off-by-one calculating the images at the top. (100-cent gives a single pixel slice of the third image.)

extrano84• 9 months ago

I think they are rounding a float for the number display and not rounding for the image as you can see different sized image segments for the months where the number remains at 100 cents. You could still be correct, I have no way of verifying.

b112• 9 months ago

It would be even funnier with exceedingly long fractionals.

EG, 109.453452 cent or 109 113363/250000 or some such.

triwats• 9 months ago

This is brilliant

petermcneeley2• 9 months ago

I think the big mac index is far more accurate gauge of inflation than the B(L)S numbers published by the government.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/apr/how-big-m...

zeroonetwothree• 9 months ago

Unless you primarily spend your money on Big Macs (in which case you have bigger problems) I don’t see how that’s true.

huhtenberg2• 9 months ago

By the same metric, but using Arizona Iced Tea, there was no inflation for ages.

CSMastermind• 9 months ago

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.

joshuamcginnis• 9 months ago

We're $38.8 trillion in debt and still printing. https://www.usdebtclock.org/

kristofferR• 9 months ago

Inflation is just what you want when your debt is denominated in the currency that is being inflated, though. The more inflation the easier it will be to service the debt.

nonethewiser8• 9 months ago

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.

mothballed9• 9 months ago

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...

rkowalick• 9 months ago

The correct calculation isn’t too hard either.

If currency halves in purchasing power in 25 yrs, that means inflation is 100% in 25 years, so

    (1 + r)^25 = 2
    r = 2^(1/25) - 1 ~ 2.8%

sudo_gopnik• 9 months ago

Historically - it's actually NOT normal. Link and quote below that examines this with graphs but, the crux is that we have accepted higher inflation in order to achieve stable inflation that is predictable.

"For the pre-Fed period (1790-1913), the average annual inflation was 0.4 percent with a coefficient of variation of 13.2. During the period 1941-2016, these figures changed to 3.5 percent and 0.8, respectively. If we look at the post-Volcker era (1988-2016), annual inflation was 2.2 percent on average with a coefficient of variation of 0.4." -

Source: https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/s...

Also recommend Debt: The First 5000 Years (David Graeber) and Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Thomas Piketty) which cover this and more on how current concepts of finance and capital post-1914 are incredibly different from the majority of human civilization.

I think a broader historical/anthropological approach is helpful here to understand why those tradeoffs were made.

gbacon2• 9 months ago

Your starting point of 1914 is strangely specific. Why did you choose it?

jollyllama• 9 months ago

A span of time that happens to include The Great Depression.

Pooge• 9 months ago

It makes me laugh when people say stocks are risky.

I agree 100% with your thought.

However, I've come with an explanation: people save $100k and the amount in itself will not budge unless they use that money. This, of course, is a flawed argument as the amount doesn't matter; what you can buy with it does. With stocks—I prefer ETFs but I digress—you do not know the amount you will have in 40 years (even if, historically, you would have made money in absolutely all cases).

This uncertainty, coupled with lack of economics knowledge, is why people qualify stocks as "risky". However, instead of "risky", I think they mean "volatile". Cash is absolutely the riskiest of assets as it loses value in 100% of cases despite being more stable than stocks.

And my cynic mind tells me that the banking industry has all to gain from telling people that "stocks are very risky", instilling fear and, instead, selling them over-complicated products where the bank is guaranteed to make a profit on the back of their clients. Of course, they tell them it's "100% safe".

mothballed9• 9 months ago

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.

silisili2• 9 months ago

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.

nonethewiser8• 9 months ago

Certainly a lot of that inflation was in the last ~8 years. I certainly know what you mean.

Groceries are one of the more discretionary items. Your mortgage is fixed, demand for gas is inelastic, etc. But groceries you respond to the price. And so many staples have become 2,3,4X times more expensive compared to pre-covid. I remember the cheap beef (chuck roast) was about $4/lb and decent steak (ribeye) was about $9/lb. Now its about $10/lb and $22/lb.

So psychologically, now your "splurging" just gets you the "cheap" stuff.

Wages have risen a bit. But 1) not nearly as much as inflation 2) these are very asymetric and 3) the way they rise doesnt feel like wage inflation. Even those who saw wages rise due to inflation probably felt like it was other things. Such as simply changing jobs. Or just normal yearly review. Or maybe they havent switched jobs and have some "unrealized gains" awaiting them still. No one one saw their wages incrementally rise month by month.

pinkmuffinere2• 9 months ago

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

jsbg• 9 months ago

that's why no one every buys TVs

gweinberg• 9 months ago

Your understanding is silly. Inflation or no inflation, you'd like to maximize your roi.

jancsika• 9 months ago

Wait, what's absurd about it?

I feel like this is the real-life version of my favorite joke from Andy Kindler: "I know they said don't re-invent the wheel, but does it have to be so round?"

Edit: emphasis

imtringued• 9 months ago

How would that work? You have a claim to a past output that no longer exists. If the nominal value of the claim stays the same, the real value of the denomination unit must change.

People don't understand that money is a time and location bound object and pretend it is infinitely liquid and fungible when it isn't. Money is kind of like electricity. When you borrow it into existence and spend it, it travels a path through society, but it must then travel along a return path back to the source. Inflation could be thought of as a form of resistive loss, where current stays the same but voltage drops.

There's a reason why demurrage (or its ugly brother inflation) is a necessary bitter pill if you want a working money system. It forces money to travel down the return path sooner than later.

crazygringo• 9 months ago

It's not absurd. And there's no automatic way to make money perfectly stable. That's not how money works.

And deflation is much worse. So we target a small 2% yearly inflation so that if it's 1% or 3% it's not a big deal. Whereas if you target 0% and wind up with -1%, you've got problems.

jart3• 9 months ago

There's that word we again. So you're the crazy gringo who always picks my pocket?

Deflation is only bad for people who hold a lot of debt. For people who are cash positive, deflation means you're richer, you're being paid more to do the same job, etc. all while maintaining your freedom. Deflation actually being good is the central gamble behind bitcoin's design. If more people understood that then they'd probably stop using it for such frivolous purposes. Not everyone is privileged enough to even hold debt, so it's really an exclusionary system. And what do the people who the system trusts to have debt (e.g. private equity firms) do with it? They do leveraged buyouts to rip out the heart and soul of responsible American companies. The only thing inflation is good for is keeping folks running on the hamster wheel and bankrolling entitlements.

asveikau• 9 months ago

Username is "CS Mastermind". Evidently not an economics mastermind.

mdnahas3• 9 months ago

Economist here. No, you don’t want that.

Inflation is annoying, but deflation is destructive. When that happens, people hold on to money as an investment and it doesn’t flow in the economy. The Great Depression was caused by deflation. (See Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the US.)

As a result, central banks try to have a little inflation, so that random mistakes don’t push us into deflation. The Fed’s target is 2%. I think it should be a little higher. (See Fischer Black’s “Interest Rates as Options” and the shadow short-term rate.)

No one should be holding inflating dollars over the long term. That money should be invested in loans (bonds, mortgages, …) or equity (stocks, real estate, …). We have good ways of comparing investments over time by removing the inflation. These are CPI or the GDP deflator.

mdnahas3• 9 months ago

P.S. Half its value over 25 years is extremely stable if you look at the history of money, especially fiat money. It halved in value in 9 years, from 1974 to 1983.

nonethewiser8• 9 months ago

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.

edit: i see elsewhere in the comments the author explains this. github action indeed.

lanewinfield4• 9 months ago

you bet. I pull it straight from the BLS.

nly• 9 months ago

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.

jhallenworld• 9 months ago

They don't say that the currencies are pegged, but I'm pretty sure they're defacto pegged. Same deal with the Euro.

metalliqaz• 9 months ago

They don't call USD the global reserve currency for nothing.

mdnahas3• 9 months ago

I went back to get an Econ masters and studied international currencies. Some exchange rates are very stable over time and we don’t know why.

borisjabes• 9 months ago

2.6% per year inflation. Fed did a decent job.

RhysU2• 9 months ago

30% error.

deadbabe• 9 months ago

Chamillionaire was another rapper who pivoted into tech investing and venture capitalism and did 50x to his net worth. I think he still posts here.

t1234s• 9 months ago

Didn't he make more money from his stake in Vitamin Water being acquired by Pepsi or CocaCola than from rap?

defraudbah7• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

He absolutely did not invent mixtapes.

fair_enough2• 9 months ago

How many 2025 dollars will it cost me to take a nice lady to the candy shop?

chriswalz• 9 months ago

A lot less than in da club that’s for sure

fair_enough2• 9 months ago

I don't care if there are some special privileges unlocked at higher "karma" levels, I hope my "karma" stays at 69 forever because of this thread.

chistev• 9 months ago

It wouldn't matter because she can't get a dollar out of you.

david927• 9 months ago

The full chart

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/2j0...

mothballed9• 9 months ago

Imagine how much worse that chart would look were it not for deflationary pressure from science/technology introduced efficiencies.

k2enemy• 9 months ago

That's an incredibly misleading graph. Never look at something with a growth rate on a linear scale, as it will always have a "hockey stick" shape, even with constant growth. If you look at the same series on a log scale, you see high inflation in the 70s, but from the '80s on it looks pretty similar to the pre-70s trend.

undebuggable• 9 months ago

I'm tired of using technology, boss.

emaccumber• 9 months ago

The favicon updating is a nice touch.

ErroneousBosh• 9 months ago

Pretty good value for a dollar, you don't see much of that these days.

bevelwork• 9 months ago

Yesterday's 50cent in today's dollar

m463• 9 months ago

I wonder if 10cc resizes due to changes in male fertility.

DyslexicAtheist• 9 months ago

reminds me of the time, a Malaysian newspaper mentioned him in a story an converted his name to local currency: 1.50 Malaysian ringgit https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3915

userbinator• 9 months ago

That or a similar occurrence elsewhere is probably the inspiration for this.

aidenn0• 9 months ago

I guess we gotta sip something cheaper than Bacardi now?

ryanschaefer• 9 months ago

Made this a while back riffing on the same idea

https://ryanschaefer.github.io/Its-one-banana-michael/

cantalopes• 9 months ago

This is the reason for internet to exist

supportengineer• 9 months ago

I think he increased since this morning!

RhysU2• 9 months ago

Too bad ska-punk beat him to today's value of 109 cents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck-O-Nine

ranman• 9 months ago

Eventually he'll be about tree fitty

hsbauauvhabzb• 9 months ago

Do you offer 50 cent in other currencies? Approximately what point in time would he have appropriately been called 50 euro cents?

defraudbah7• 9 months ago

my friends use 50 cent often as a meme in their local currency to track devaluation comparing to dollar

arneslot• 9 months ago

I created an account just to comment that I laughed my balls off as a hiphophead.

kevin_thibedeau• 9 months ago

Needs to use an AI generated coin in his likeness.

aatd86• 9 months ago

To be benchmarked against his net worth.

ladon86• 9 months ago

Burying the lede here, the real story is that he was already 60 Cent by the time his first album dropped.

henry_bone• 9 months ago

This is backwards. He's still 50 cent, but to have the buying power he had in '94, he'd need to $1.09. But he's still 50 cent, so really, in today's money he's more like 23 cent.

benrapscallion• 9 months ago

Absolutely. This is the correct way do this. It should be adjusted downwards to account for inflation, not up.

megaloblasto• 9 months ago

50 cent's intrinsic value doesn't decrease over time so to maintain that value, his name must go up.

roblh• 9 months ago

I would have gone the other way. He’s still 50 Cent today, but he’s less than a quarter 20 years ago.

alex1138• 9 months ago

What does Ja Rule think about this?

ugh123• 9 months ago

50 cent sure loves Republican administrations

hamasho• 9 months ago

Reminds me this: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/9ljv3n/50_cent_in_ma...

pavelstoev• 9 months ago

Much respect for the artist 50 Cent - converted his rap music success into respectable business ventures (Vitamin Water, others). So he is worth much more now!

kiriberty• 9 months ago

He just changed name to One Buck.

MBCook• 9 months ago

From what I can tell Ke$ha started putting the dollar sign in her name between 2009 and 2010.

At that time 50¢ was only worth about 75¢, making Ke$ha the clear queen of finally named music performers.

charlieflowers• 9 months ago

Kevin Hart is what's left when you adjust 50 Cent for inflation.

MrThoughtful• 9 months ago

From 1994 to now, it only goes from 50 to 109?

That looks like the "inflation" the government wants you to believe in.

Name one thing that only doubled in price over the last 30 years.

Even gold (which has its own inflation) went up in price 10 fold.

archon810• 9 months ago

The author's website and Instagram are amazing. I subscribed.

https://brianmoore.com

So fun.

l5870uoo9y• 9 months ago

Inflation rose by 6.5 cents/year in the period 2020-2022, and if that were the case for the entire period, the 50 cents would have grown to 201.5 cents.

guerrilla• 9 months ago

Yes, of course is name was coined.

grashalm• 9 months ago

This is the internet at its best.

dankobgd• 9 months ago

He can now only be a window shopper

jrochkind1• 9 months ago

Interesting that as of August 2025 exactly, he's become the pop ska punk band Buck-o-Nine, which is probably distressing to both of them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByaBdXi77Zg

Although I guess buck-o-nine is now approx $2.37, which is also concerning.

keitmo• 9 months ago

I've always thought of him as Nibble.

2 bits = a quarter (25 cents), 4 bits = 50 cents

8 bits = byte, 4 bits = nibble

Therefore 50 Cent = Nibble.

The Rapper 50 Cent, Adjusted for Inflation

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