JAY-Z Explains Why He Sold TIDAL and Ace Of Spades Champagne

JAY-Z went on a selling spree a couple of weeks ago, flipping a majority TIDAL stake to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and 50 percent of his champagne brand Armand de Brignac to luxury mega-conglomerate LVMH.

The sales upped Hov's net worth to $1.4 billion but was criticized by folks like DJ Akademiks, who believed Jay baited and switched Black consumers by promoting his business as "Black owned" before selling them to the white man.

In an interview with the South China Morning Post, Hov explained why he sold, explaining his celebrity isn't enough to run businesses.

“I’m very fortunate,” he said. “Jack Dorsey, who created Twitter, Square and Cash App, and Philippe [Schaus] and the guys who created LVMH – you couldn’t ask for better partners; they’re the top of the top. [Things] usually align like that when people do really great things. You could get into partnerships and people short-change the business for different reasons. These guys don’t cut corners, they try to get it right. It’s about respect.

We ran this brand from the office with eight or nine people, a really small, scrappy group,” JAY continued. “We became very successful and we’ve always looked at LVMH as the pinnacle of what we represent, a group that creates things based on their love of luxury, of getting the details perfectly correct. If I’m going to be in a partnership, especially with a brand that’s so successful, it has to enhance the brand, it can’t hinder it.

This isn’t a celebrity brand, it’s a luxury brand. It’s a brand to be taken seriously and it’s not a rapper’s brand. [There was an element of] fighting against that, the weight of your own celebrity. While celebrity is not all bad, in that it can bring a new customer to something they otherwise [wouldn’t have experienced], it has to be – like everything else in the world – balanced.”