For the kickoff of their new season of Cribs, MTV took a tour of 50 Cent’s home [airing Thursday 11/29, 10:30pm], and we’ll be catching a glimpse of his expansive estate – even that now-famous lake in the back yard. The former home of Mike Tyson, 50’s domain is nothing short of an American palace. Add in some modernized interior design and state of the art gadgets, and you’ve got 50 Cent’s G-Unit kingdom.
Although Cribs is great at showcasing an entire house, we wanted to get more in depth about the technology in this party fortress. We linked up a pretty clear call with 50 while he was touring overseas – Slovakia to be exact – to discuss some of the finer points of his home and auto electronics.
AllHipHop.com: We hear you have a custom DJ booth, a lighted dance floor, an elevator, home theater and more. What are your favorite aspects of the electronics in your house?
50 Cent: A lot of the electronic system is Touchtron – you can control from the wall, bedside or throughout the actual house. I can turn televisions and stereos on all over my house from whichever end of my home I’m in. If I’m on the west side of my house, I can turn things on on the east side. I can set the music to what I want to be playing over there without actually going all the way over to the other side of the house. In the neighborhood I grew up in, the west side of my house to the east side of the house is like walking pretty much to the middle of the block that I was actually living on.
The cool part about having it set up like that is you can actually see what’s actively being used in the house on the system. I can tell if someone is in one of the actual areas, because if somebody’s moving within the house I can tell.
AllHipHop.com: We understand the home theater is crazy. What do you have in there?
50 Cent: Inside my actual home theater I got this thing called a Kaleidoscope – it’s like a hard drive that has 3,000 movies on it. It doesn’t actually come with those movies, you gotta load them in. My job is to upgrade it a few times. Instead of having a room full of CD cases that the DVDs are in because you never remember to put them back in the right cases, and you’re looking around [for them] on the wall… they’re actually loaded into the system.
So if I get a new DVD, I put it in and load it into the system, and scan the artwork. Say you picked one of the Rocky films – all five of them will come up around it, and other action films and Sylvester Stallone films like Rambo and all the other stuff will start coming up onto the screen. You can look at it as an option of something else that you might wanna look at.
AllHipHop.com: Does it kind of work like Tivo where you pull up a little menu on the screen?
50 Cent: Nah, it’s like a little red box and you move it through the cover artwork, and when you pick that movie then it shuffles, and everything like that film will move. Then it will move again to show you everything with the star of the film that you’re watching. Say you like Al Pacino or Robert Deniro, it will show you 20 or 30 films that they’ve worked on as an option for you to actually pick.
AllHipHop.com: Your DJ booth is custom? What is custom about it?
50 Cent: The whole system inside there is digital. The traditional DJ setup is when you have separate pieces of things like the 1200 turntables. I have the old turntables that you would actually rub, but then I got the CDJ turntables. They got those to add [equipment] up in there, but it’s a whole wall of digital stuff like the effects and the lights, the projection screen [and] there’s a TV wall in there with 20 TVs.
The actual system is kind of like controlling a light show at the same time. We had somebody who does the custom systems like that – it’s something that would be in a nightclub, not in someone’s house. You know how you’re in a nightclub and they got the strobe lights going off and stuff like that? Aint no disco ball in there, but the electric and neon lights and stuff like that. It holds about 1500 people if I want to have a party.
AllHipHop.com: And you have a stripper area…
50 Cent: Yeah, the adult entertainment area. [laughs]
AllHipHop.com: Which could double as a runway if you wanted to have a fashion show or something.
50 Cent: [laughs] Yeah.
AllHipHop.com: You’ve said you keep your cars ‘stock’ because of the value system, and you only have a stereo in one of your cars. Have you applied any electronic gadgets to these collectible cars that you have, or do you just keep them exactly the way you bought them?
50 Cent: There’s three of them on Cribs that don’t have the actual systems in them. The Ferrari F50, the Ferrari F40 and the [Ferrari] Enzo. The Ferrari 599 is the only one that has music in it – these vehicles don’t come with music systems. The Enzo wouldn’t come from the dealership, you would actually be buying it from an owner because they only had 300 of them issued when they actually made them. I paid a million dollars for that car.
AllHipHop.com: You said the value will continue to go up as long as you keep it in mint condition, correct?
50 Cent: Yeah, you keep them in mint condition and the value goes up. A lot of times if they’re looking at the mileage on the actual vehicle, [value is assessed] by how many years went by since they came out and how low the mileage is on them. It’s a collector thing, where at a different point you can go out get them off and get something new if you want or whatever. Away from that, I got other things that they haven’t even seen in the Cribs episode. I got the 100 EX convertible Phantom, my Pontiac G8 the one that’s in the actual car show. That car is super fast, it’s a 550 Trans Am.
AllHipHop.com: What’s your favorite car to drive day to day?
50 Cent: That’s my favorite one right now, the G8. It’s because it’s low and there ain’t that much attention to it, so I could get next to somebody on the highway and eat ’em up if I wanted to, because they don’t know that that car has that much power in it. The 550 [horsepower on the G8] is actually more than the Gallardo. The Lamborghini Gallardo is only 500. I play with the cars on the parkway, and [other drivers] be thinking they can just leave me. [laughs]
It’s been so crazy because I could spin out in that car and it doesn’t have gears, it’s an automatic. That’s a lot of power. You got a five-seat vehicle and you can just shift gears and spin out wherever you’re at if you know how to drive. On automatic you have to be feeling like you got something.
AllHipHop.com: Are you a very big gamer?
50 Cent: Occasionally I’ll play video games, I try to keep up with them because my son is crazy about video games.
AllHipHop.com: What’s his favorite platform?
50 Cent: Play Station 3 and the Nintendo Wii, he likes that.
AllHipHop.com: What games have you played with him?
50 Cent: All the sports games, even golf is fun on [the Wii].
AllHipHop.com: We heard that you have a pretty basic cell phone and you don’t rock the handheld computers and things like that. Do you have a particular preference on handheld technology?
50 Cent: I like my regular cell phone… don’t have no camera in it, no email or none of that. I be trying to keep people away from me, it’s too much access at some point. Of course I have a Blackberry for when it’s necessary, but away from that, if you’re at leisure… if I was considering myself [to be] on vacation or I’m chilling out somewhere, I’m using a regular cell phone. It’s impossible for you to have a moment to yourself without somebody calling to check with you for the next thing.
