50 Cent Loses $16 Million Headphone Lawsuit

50 Cent has lost a lawsuit against headphones company Sleek Audio, who sued the rapper for “misappropriating trade secrets, breaching his fiduciary duty owed to Sleek, participating in a civil conspiracy, breaching his confidentiality agreement with Sleek, and being unjustly enriched.”

50, who was originally planning to collaborate with Sleek on his own line of headphones, invested more than $1 million to start his line with the company before deciding to partner with a different company to create another set of headphones called “Sync by 50.” Court documents reportedly show Sleek were “stunned” when they discovered that the “Sync by 50” headphones were “basically the same design, mechanically” as the pair they had developed.

Sleek’s statement against 50 also claimed the rapper and his assistants stole confidential information from a website they developed to promote the headphones before they were produced. The website featured 3,639 potential customers’ email addresses and other data, which “disappeared” after the rapper’s team was given the password. Apparently when Sleek e-mailed 50’s team about the breach, his personal business manager Nicolee Martin wrote “[Sleek] is onto us, LOL. They emailed and called … about the data.”

Another member of 50’s team is said to have also sent an email to a colleague, saying: “Tell him something like, sorry, you just have to finish editing a video for 50 or something, we’ll get to it, LOL (sic)”

50 has been ordered by a judge to pay up $11,693,247 in damages, plus $4,488,331 in attorney’s fees.