On meeting the rapper and business mogul 50 Cent, the first thing you notice is that he’s a lot smaller than he looks on-stage. In live performance, his muscular physique seems almost implausibly pumped up – rather as an iguana will inflate itself with air so it can fall from a considerable height without hurting itself. In person, he is a more contained but still commanding presence, impeccably polite and even jovial.

This particular day – in a luxurious suite at the Lowry Hotel in Manchester, the morning after a sold-out gig – he is simply dressed in jeans, sneakers, baseball cap and relatively discreet (but no doubt wildly expensive) platinum and diamond jewellery. His T-shirt has a seemingly unremarkable design, involving a quantity of dollar bills. But when illuminated by a shaft of winter sunlight, these banknotes momentarily take on a three-dimensional aspect, so the money seems almost to be exploding out of his chest, like blood pouring from a wound.

Given the apparent ease with which 50 Cent turned the near fatal injuries he received when shot nine times at close range (see below) into one of the most successful marketing gimmicks in pop history, this trick of the light seems almost eerily apposite. The effect is compounded by heavy bandaging on one of his densely tattooed arms, the aftermath of a minor accident at the wheel of his 4x4. “It’s not that bad,” the soft-spoken rapper nods at the dressing with a wry smile, “I just covered it up ’cos it’s ugly.”

From rap to riches – the 50 Cent story

1975 Born July 6 in Queens, New York, 50 Cent is christened Curtis James Jackson III but his family call him “Boo Boo”. His mother, 15-year-old Sabrina Jackson, is not in contact with his father.

1983 Sabrina Jackson – by then working as a drug-dealer – is found murdered in her Long Island apartment. Her son, already living on and off with his grandparents and eight aunts and uncles, moves back to join them in Queens full time.

1986 Having been unsuccessfully prescribed with Ritalin, the hyperactive 11-year-old finds solace in boxing.

1987 Begins selling cocaine on local street corners.

1990 Arrested while still a student at New York’s Andrew Jackson High School when he is found with drugs in his trainers.

1994 Arrested for trying to sell crack cocaine to an undercover police officer, and then again a few weeks later when drugs and a large quantity of money are found at his home. Facing three to nine years in prison, he instead serves six months at boot camp.

1996 Jam Master Jay, legendary DJ with Run DMC helps Jackson – now known as 50 Cent – record his first album, which is never released.

2000 50 Cent’s first single “How to Rob” – a lurid fantasy about stealing from various celebrities – is just starting to take off when he is shot nine times at close range. After 13 days in hospital, it takes him a further five months to make a full recovery. The alleged shooter is found dead a few weeks later.

2002 Discovered by rapper Eminem, who helps sign 50 Cent to a million-dollar contract with Interscope Records.

2003 Debut album Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ released. It goes on to sell 12m copies. Also launches G-Unit record label, clothing and footwear lines and Formula 50 vitamin water to a warm public reception.

2005 Second album, The Massacre, sells more than a million copies in its first four days.

2007 Company behind Formula 50 is bought by Coca-Cola for $4.1bn. Forbes estimates 50 Cent’s share of this transaction at $100m after tax.

During our conversation, 50 (as his fans know him), continually reaches forward with his healthier arm and taps on my knee with his middle finger. He may be doing this to emphasise the truth of what he is saying, to give his words a form of manual punctuation, or perhaps even translate them into morse code, but given the violent subject matter of many of his lyrics the effect could easily be a little intimidating.

Such is his obvious delight at the prospect of being interviewed by the Financial Times, however, that it seems best to interpret 50 Cent’s percussive digit as the expression of a rarely remarked capacity for physical tenderness. “I used to read the Wall Street Journal before my music took off,” he reveals. In the field of employment in which 50 then found himself – dealing drugs on the mean streets of Southside, Queens – financial journalism was not considered required reading. “People probably assumed I had more interest in the sports section but for me it was always amazing to see the possibilities. I don’t see any limits. And with the right decisions, and of course with the money to put my ideas into practice, I knew I could become involved in some investments that could take me to a different space, financially.”

There is a tendency to view the business ventures of those in the music industry through a filter of cynicism. In 50 Cent’s case, however, this situation has effectively been reversed. Far from turning his back on the art form he loved to pursue easy money from advertising contracts or merchandise, he seems to have regarded his music as a means of entry into the one arena where his creativity could find its fullest expression – the world of business.

From the moment his mainstream career was launched – as the protégé of fellow 18-rated wordsmith Eminem and producer Dr Dre (a symbiotic relationship that brought 50 ready access to a huge white suburban audience and the latter duo huge financial rewards and a healthy measure of reflected glory) – 50 Cent showed an instinctive grasp of the best way to translate the popularity of his music into a dizzying range of other commercial interests.

Last year, the company that makes 50 Cent-endorsed grape-flavoured Formula 50 vitamin water was sold for more than $4bn, with his share of this transaction estimated at $100m. “Because I did a deal very early on, and got in the elevator on the first floor,” he notes modestly, “when it reached the top, I was a big part of the situation.”

The rapper’s sober but remorselessly entertaining autobiography, From Pieces To Weight, abounds with parallels between the twilight world of the street-corner hustler and the fluorescently lit realm of legitimate commerce, starting with the elder drug-dealer who obligingly takes the teenage 50 to one side to advise him on the unfeasibility of his “business model”. It’s an equation often made in hip-hop and, like many clichés, contains a kernel of truth.

“The one real difference between a boss in my neighbourhood and the CEO of a company,” 50 explains, “is that the guy selling drugs doesn’t think killing you is not an option. The guy running the straight business might not have psychotic means of accomplishing his goals – he won’t have you shot just to take over the corner you’re standing on – but he will do pretty much everything else short of killing you to get what he wants.”

For all his bleakly Darwinian vision of the realities of corporate life, 50 Cent is happy to have left behind the more violent aspects of his former existence. “There are some people who actively enjoy doing the wrong thing,” he says quietly. “Then there are others that are just standing there within the entrepreneurial spirit, thinking, ‘This is regrettable, but it’s gotta be done.’ I definitely fell within the latter category. For me, it was the only way that I could provide for myself. I was only a kid when I started dealing and I was kind of in a cycle. My mum had decided to go into that type of lifestyle in order to take care of me, and even though that decision led to her death, because I associated everything good in my life with her, I made the mistake of going the same way.”

Fifty Cent’s assessment of the most famous of his own numerous brushes with the grim reaper is: “You don’t feel the pain until you know you’re OK. Then, once the doctor says you’re going to be fine, everything starts hurting. Suddenly you’ve got a headache in the middle of your leg.” In From Pieces To Weight, he puts an almost messianic gloss on his recovery from those nine bullet wounds: “When you look at how my body healed itself, I want you to see the bodies of those who never healed.” Yet, in person, he seems quite humble about it: “The only thing that puts itself back together is the human body,” he says gratefully. “All we need a doctor for is to line up the bones.”

Fifty Cent has few peers when it comes to turning a negative into a positive. Even the distinctive slurred vocal delivery that made his first, and biggest, hit “In Da Club” so instantly memorable came from the hole in his gum left by a bullet. And if his seductive packaging of this aspect of his identity gives a vicarious thrill to people, well, so much the better. “There are some people who hear the music and identify with it because they’ve lived through something similar,” he observes even-handedly, “and others who enjoy how close it brings them to a world they don’t actually have to inhabit.”

Far from being a symptom of his inability to leave behind the ghetto mentality that shaped him, the endless feuds with other rappers that seem to accompany each new record release are simply a matter of giving the public what they want. “What I’m doing,” 50 Cent explains “is trying to capture a portion of my earlier experience perfectly, before I move on and do different things.”

Alongside the endless expansion of his business empire (clothing, trainers, watches, video games and publishing are just scratching the surface), film seems to be a significant growth area. While Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ (2005), Oscar-winning director Jim Sheridan’s movie version of 50 Cent’s life-story, did not quite do justice to the material it was adapted from, 50’s performance seems to have worked as a cinematic calling-card.

Imminent theatrical releases include The Dance with Nicolas Cage and Righteous Kill (“That’s myself, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro”). While the subject matter of these films is hardly a quantum leap from that of his albums, 50 insists these projects have “enabled me to go some place creatively that I can’t go within my music”. What does he mean by that exactly? “It’s exciting for me to be able to show my vulnerability. Hip-hop is so competitive that it doesn’t allow you to do that: the aggressive nature of the art form obliges you to stay in a position where you’re willing to compete.”

On the face of it, his September 2007 “chart battle” with Kanye West. (when the co-ordinated release dates of the two leading rappers’ third albums inspired a Blur v Oasis style media furore in the US) provided irrefutable evidence of 50 Cent’s declining powers in the musical marketplace. In fact, to have taken a record in which no one – least of all the artist himself – seems to have had very much interest and placed it at the centre of America’s cultural life was a master-stroke of showbiz hucksterism. Shifting nearly 700,000 copies in one week in the current austere CD sales climate is the kind of second place most of his peers would gladly settle for.

The prevailing image of West as the thinking person’s counterpart to 50 Cent’s brutish hoodlum underestimates the latter’s street-smart shrewdness. But from the Reading Festival crowd who threw bottles at him in the summer of 2005 to the widespread misconception that he “stood up for” George W Bush in the aftermath of Kanye West’s attack on the US president’s handling of Hurricane Katrina (“I said he was a gangster but people didn’t understand what I meant: they thought it was a compliment”), 50 seems to draw strength from other people’s negative perceptions of him.

Even mention of the so-called Christian group who recently called him a “Satanic piece of filth” does not seem to faze him “When you’re a public figure”, 50 Cent shrugs affably, “everyone has a right to their opinion of you.”

And you don’t begrudge it? “You can’t,” he replies calmly, “because it’ll make you go crazy ... That’s the moment celebrities really start to lose touch with reality, when they start to care too much what the public thinks about them. They’ll be looking at what the bloggers are saying about them ... A blogger can say whatever he wants.”

In 50 Cent’s own personal space, etiquette is of the highest importance. Viewers of America’s Next Top Model will, for example, have seen him in attendance at a poolside party in Los Angeles. This occasion had been arranged so that the show’s aspirant clothes-horses might test the waters of the celebrity lifestyles into which they were theoretically about to launch themselves. One especially bumptious wannabe mannequin found herself experiencing this rite of passage in a rather more literal way than the show’s producers had anticipated.

50 Cent takes up the story: “I threw her in the pool,” he remembers, matter-of-factly. “I guess she was over-excited that I was there. She kept coming back at me and jumping in the middle of other people’s conversations but I was trying to talk to everybody – that’s what I was there for. I asked her to leave and she didn’t – she was really starting to irritate me. So I threw her in the pool. I didn’t do it for show, that’s just how my personality is. She was hot though,” he concedes gallantly, after a ruminative pause.

The frisson of mingled fear and sexual arousal generated by his mere presence has been a strategic asset in 50’s business career. “Fools like the perception better than the actual reality,” he notes bluntly. “So if people have a perception of 50 Cent based on what they’ve heard, and it’s not actually who I am as a person, then that can be very useful. Especially if people think that I’m not paying attention. If I’m having a business conversation with some guy, and we’re hanging out, and he’s excited just to be in my world, then there’s every chance he’s going to sign up to something his lawyer wouldn’t necessarily have wanted him to commit to.”

At this point, as his manager pokes his head round the door to indicate that our conversation is coming to a close, 50 asks that the tape recorder be turned off, while he outlines the concept of “The Lion in the Room”. The gist is as follows. Just as if you walked into a boardroom and saw a mountain lion gazing back at you, the predatory feline would automatically have your attention, so it is that in business meetings of a certain size, everyone else will apparently always defer to the person who makes the least visible response to whoever is doing the talking.

Fifty Cent, almost needless to say, is always the lion in the room, “because people know what I’m capable of, or what they think I’m capable of”. Later this year he will publish The Fiftieth Law, a whole book of such invaluable business lore (co-written with Robert Greene, bestselling author of Machiavellian self-help manuals The 48 Laws of Power and The 33 Strategies of War). It is almost frightening to think of the amount of leonine stone-walling that will be going on in American boardrooms once this volume hits the shelves.

Ben Thompson is the author of ‘Ways of Hearing’ (Orion) and presents ‘The London Ear’ on Resonance 104.4FM