JAY-Z Weighs in on Financial Debate: $500,000 or Lunch With Him?

Rapper JAY-Z has weighed in on the enduring internet debate regarding whether fans would rather have a $500,000 payout, or lunch with the Brooklyn legend himself.

Sitting down with Gayle King for an interview on CBS Mornings, King explained the meme to JAY-Z before asking him what he thought of the debate.

"You gotta take the money," he said immediately. "What I'mma say?"

At the star's dismissal of the proposition, King told him that many fans feel “the wisdom that [they] would get from [you] would be so beneficial to [them],” and therefore worth the money.

But JAY-Z was having none of that.

“You got all that in the music for $10.99, he reasoned. “That’s a bad deal! I wouldn’t tell you to cut a bad deal. Take the $500,000, go buy some albums and listen to the albums. It’s all there."

The Super Bowl Halftime auteur continued: "If you piece it together and really listen to the music for the words, for what it is, it’s all there. Everything that I said was going to happen, happened. Everything that I said I wanted to do, I’ve done, and there’s the blueprint," referring to his iconic 2001 album.

"The blueprint—literally—to me and my life and my journey is there already."

Though it’s unclear when the question was first posed, the money-or-lunch debate was popularized around 2017, when versions of the question popped up on Instagram and X (then Twitter). Back then, the figures were much smaller — $10,000 for a 10-minute “lunch”—but the rhetorical price rose as time passed.

JAY-Z’s interview with King will air Thursday on CBS Mornings, with an encore on Friday.