Jay-Z's Most Badass Tech Moments

Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter has lived many hustles in his lifetime and been successful at nearly all of them. Fashion, music, book publishing and even sports management—the multi-platinum rapper straight out of the Marcy Projects continues to show us why he’s not your typical Fortune 500 businessman, but in fact an actual business, man. His most recent partnership with Samsung screams volumes, with the mobile giant paying Jay $5 each for 1 million copies of his newly announced Magna Carta Holy Grail album, which will be available to a select group of Galaxy smartphone owners nearly 72 hours before its official release on Independence Day.

But with all the Twitter buzz surrounding his latest business partnership, it seems like the majority forget about Hov's massive influence on the tech game since the start of the Millennium. Well, allow us to reintroduce you to Jay-Z's Most Badass Tech Moments.

Date: Oct. 17, 2000

All it takes is a name drop to make or break a company. Right when Motorola was losing its mobile mojo, Jigga placed his stamp of approval on the company's revolutionary text-messaging device on the "I Just Wanna Love U (Give it 2 Me)" single, transforming the Motorola P935 into a pop culture staple. Steve Stoute takes full credit for pressuring Jay to mention the telecommunications giant in an effort to spread brand awareness. Ya boy's a hustler, baby!

Date: Dec. 19, 2003

During the era of push-to-talk cells and the Sidekick, it was rare to see a mobile phone come preloaded with an entire music album. Nokia saw it as an opportunity to partner with S. Carter and give fans a farewell gift during the rapper's premature retirement by offering a special version of the Nokia 330 featuring a full version of The Black Album, along with additional Jay-Z ringtones and wallpapers. Easy fallback guap.

Date: June 8, 2006

Once Apple introduced the MacBook, PC companies were struggling for solutions to compete with the sleek and ultra-powered laptop. Thanks to clever marketing, HP managed to survive Apple’s onslaught with its “Computer is Personal Again” commercials, which featured a variety of celebs—none bigger than S Dot. Jay utilized the ad to promote his several business ventures, even showing a first look at the Brooklyn Nets new arena via virtual blueprint scale. He was labeled the CEO of Hip-Hop for a reason.

Date: Nov. 6, 2007

One of the few to rally against Apple’s multimedia service at the time, Jigga refused to release his American Gangster album on iTunes, stating his work should be heard as a whole and not experienced through single tracks. In his words: “As movies are not sold scene by scene, this collection will not be sold as individual singles.” It might have hurt album sales, but the move stands as a testament to Jay’s willpower to play by his own rules, not the industry's.

Date: June 5, 2009

"This is anti-auto-tune, death of the ringtone, This ain't for iTunes, this ain't for sing-alongs." The exact sentiments shared on Jay's lead Blueprint 3 single, "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)", which shifted the urban music landscape by encouraging top hip-hop acts to create original music without the audio-processing technology popularized by artists like T-Pain. A moment of silence was definitely in order.

Date: April 5, 2011

Roc-A-Wear solidified Jay-Z’s status as a fashion icon. So where does a multi-million-dollar entrepreneur go from there? How about launching a lifestyle website run by a full staff of editors and writers creating original content. The Life + Times domain remains another outlet to promote the Jay-Z brand and delivers a unique viewing experience that’s yet to be replicated on the web publication front.

Date: Aug. 8, 2011

Bring up Watch the Throne on your iPhone, select Track 2 (“Lift Off”), hit the 3:18 mark and tell us if you recognize anything familiar in the background. Yep, that's the countdown sequence from the Apollo 11 mission. What? Ya'll thought Jigga wasn't up on his astronomy?

Date: Aug. 16, 2011

After Jay and Kanye made their collab album exclusive on iTunes three days before its official release, the duo made history by breaking the media service’s one-week sales record and dethroning the previous champ: Coldplay’s Viva La Vida. Watch the Throne pushed 288,000 total downloads in its first seven days. Nah, Nah, Nah!

Date: Oct. 17, 2011

A month before dropping Decoded—an autobiography and memoir based on the rapper’s most popular rap lyrics—Microsoft locked in a deal to unveil pages from the book for fans through the use of Bing. The PC giant physically placed excerpts around NYC in locations that featured specific content on its search engine, revealing five to 10 pages each day. Reports say Microsoft spent several millions on the partnership, which Jay clearly pocketed as profit. Google slept on that opportunity.

Date: July 25, 2012

People took Jigga’s Duracell partnership as a joke when seeing those subway ads promoting the company’s new portable charging solution. Then the Powermat commercial dropped with Jay’s surprise cameo and caught everyone off guard quicker than the Roc-A-Fella breakup. Duracell cut the mean check and Iceberg Slim helped sell a lot of Powermats. Imaginary player? Think not.

Date: July 30, 2012

Video games and hip-hop practically go hand-in-hand. Knowing the market well, 2K Sports decided its basketball game franchise needed some additional star power. So the publisher brought on the world’s most popular rap act and granted him the title of executive producer for NBA 2K13. On top of consulting with developers to improve gameplay, he also curated the soundtrack, which included a number of music heavyweights such as Jay-Z himself, Daft Punk, Kanye West, Nas, Eric B. & Rakim, U2 and more. This was pretty much the gig that got him to score The Great Gatsby film soundtrack.

Date: Oct. 6, 2012

Those who tried scoring admission to any one of Jay’s Barclay Center shows might have had better success sticking up the President in the White House, as tickets sold out within a matter of minutes and went for bids higher than $6,000 on the Internet. But William H. Bonnie knows all about pleasing his fan base. That’s why Roc Nation chose to stream his final performance on YouTube to help promote the rapper’s "JAY Z's Life+Times" channel. Would you pass up a free Jay concert?

Date: Nov. 26, 2012

Jay’s arguably the most inactive rapper on Twitter these days. But even he couldn't resist throwing shots at the New York Knicks after seeing his formerly owned Brooklyn Nets take the first game in the regular season series. Takes balls to get at the Knicks faithful like that.

Date: June 16, 2013

Buying out an entire commercial break during Game 5 of the NBA Finals, Samsung finally unveiled its reported multi-million-dollar partnership deal with Sean Carter. The TV ad, which featured production heavyweights Rick Rubin, Timbaland, Pharrell, and Swizz Beatz, served as nothing more than an official PSA for Jay’s upcoming album titled Magna Carta Holy Grail due out July 4th. The big homie caked $5 million on the deal and in exchange, Samsung gets 1 million free copies of the album that it'll offer for free via mobile app to the first million Galaxy owners in advance. That's good business.

Date: June 17, 2013

Less than 24 hours after his big Samsung commercial set the Twitterverse ablaze, Shawn took to the microblogging site for what he referred to as his “yearly allotment.” Taking a page from Yeezy's book, Mr. West’s big brother went off using the #newrules hashtag, keynoting the major events transpiring in hip-hop that should be viewed as standards moving forward.