It has been a bad few weeks for 50 Cent. The rapper — real name: Curtis Jackson III — glanced at his bank statement recently and found that the global recession had taken a large bite out of his fortune. “The credit crunch has hit rap,” he said last week. “I lost a few million but that’s because I have so much.”

The last part is unarguable: the 34-year-old is estimated to be worth £270m, a figure accrued at breakneck speed since he shot to fame in 2003 with the release of his major-label debut album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’. As well as his music, he has financial interests in film, computer games and sportswear. His business interests have elevated him above the usual music celebrity circuit: last week he was to be found not on Radio 1 but on Radio 4’s Today programme. Evan Davis was questioning him on the similarities between surviving on the mean streets and getting ahead in business, the subject of his recent book The 50th Law.

Despite this, when we meet he says that his real passion has always been horsepower not PowerPoint: “I just bought the Rolls-Royce 100EX [the early name for the Phantom Drophead],” he purrs in a tone as smooth as the 6.75-litre V12 engine. “It’s amazing.”

He says he tried to buy the £315,000 convertible from Rolls after first setting eyes on the prototype four years ago, but the company refused. He threatened to cut the roof off his standard Phantom but settled for one of the first production models. “I wanted something more sporty — I’m not an old man,” he says with a shrug.

Surely the 19ft-long convertible is not what you’d call sporty. Nor, I tell him, is it what younger rev-heads would call a babe magnet. “Yeah ... but my face is the babe magnet,” he fires back, breaking into a smile.

It has been a turbocharged rise from rags to riches for 50 Cent. Before the release of his Get Rich album he was touring in a 1993 Dodge Caravan. “The worst car I ever had,” he says, shaking his head as he pictures the dorky shoebox that smoked like an Iraqi oil fire and doubled as his tour bus. “We used to call it the A-Team van. It refused to keep the hubcaps on the side of the rims and it would break down all the time. Musician? I damn near turned mechanic.”

He didn’t, of course, and six years on, the rapper no longer turns up to gigs trailing a faint aroma of axle grease.

“Where I’m from, the first sign of success drives by on four wheels,” he says of South Jamaica — the neighbourhood in Queens, New York, where he grew up. By any standards it was a tough place. He never knew his father, and his mother, a drug dealer, was murdered when he was eight. He was raised by his grandparents in a house he shared with eight aunts and uncles, and he was under pressure to bring in some cash. “I was 12 when I started dealing drugs and I bought my first car — a Toyota Land Cruiser — at 19,” he says, adding that he soon upgraded to a white Mercedes 400 SE. In 1994 he was arrested for selling cocaine to an undercover police officer and sentenced to three to nine years in prison, but he served only six months in a boot camp.

That was almost the end of the story. In May 2000, 50 was shot nine times while sitting in a friend’s car outside his grandparents’ house. He was hit in the hand, arm, hip, chest, legs and left cheek, but was out of hospital in 13 days and made a full recovery within five months.

Then, in 2002, by which point he was focusing on music and touring in his Dodge Caravan, 50 had a stroke of luck: an associate happened to pass some tapes of his music to the manager of Eminem, the rap superstar. Eminem flew 50 to LA and signed him on the spot to his record label for $1m.

The deal called for a new set of wheels, so he bought a banana-yellow Ferrari Enzo. “They said I’d paid a million dollars,” he recounts, “but I didn’t. When I buy a car, I draw ’em down.”

50 appears to be enjoying our interview — his third of the day — but this could be his acting skills. The rapper stars in Dead Man Running, a British gangster flick. His high profile sits uneasily with his dubious past and raises the question: is he a bad role model? “I’m absolutely inspiring,” he insists. “I mean, you might pick a [church] minister and say he’s a role model when he might be beating his wife at home. People who come from an environment where they don’t have very much use me as an example, rather than use the difficult situations they go through as an excuse.”

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