2 Chainz Can Afford Almost Anything. What He Wants Now Isn’t for Sale.

2 Chainz, the rapper born Tauheed Epps, built his career by investing in himself. At 49, with a bestselling memoir, a new album on the way and a podcast with his son, freedom looks like peace, family and time.

Photo Credit: Ben Draper

INTERVIEW AND BOOKING LAURA SCHREFFLER

PHOTOGRAPHY BEN DRAPER

STYLING BLU BREWSTER OF THREADHAUS 8 / SNFT

SHOT ON LOCATION AT HOTEL PHOENIX ATLANTA

Part One

2 Chainz sleeps in his bracelets. He packs more watches than he needs. He has encountered a hundred-thousand-dollar martini, two-million-dollar shoes and forty-eight-thousand-dollar sunglasses. Asking him about luxury could reasonably turn into a very expensive conversation.

Instead, he talks about buying his mother a house.

“Buying my mama a house and handing her those keys meant more to me than any chain or car,” he says. “Being able to take care of my family, have some peace and move how I want to move, that feels like luxury to me.”

The keys are the detail that stays with me. For a man who helped make most expensivest part of the cultural vocabulary, the purchase he singles out is something someone he loves gets to live in. The pleasure is in what he can do for her. And the freedom he describes is equally specific: looking after his family, deciding how he spends his days, having room to enjoy the life he has worked to create.

He hasn’t suddenly developed an aversion to expensive things. Let’s not get carried away. But Tauheed Epps, now 49, is considerably more interested in what a purchase does for him than what it tells everyone else.

“I’ve always liked expensive things, but that don’t mean I’m gonna buy everything just because it costs a lot,” he says. “Some stuff is just ridiculous.”

Photo Credit: Ben Draper

There is something reassuring about the man who has seen the two-million-dollar shoes drawing a line somewhere. His taste remains intact; his priorities have become more exacting. Another piece of jewelry still has its appeal. These days, though, it has competition.

“I was looking at buying another expensive chain, and something in me was like, you already got chains,” he says. “Put that money into something that can grow.”

The man’s name is 2 Chainz. The internal voice had a point.

“So I invested in one of my businesses instead,” he continues. “That’s the difference now. The younger me probably would’ve bought the jewelry. Today, I’d rather own something.”

Invest over impress. It’s a useful philosophy, particularly when you have already done a fair amount of impressing. His portfolio spans real estate, hospitality, sports, cannabis, food, fashion and entertainment. The question now is where an opportunity belongs in the life he wants, and whether it is worth the attention required to make it work.

Of those ventures, Esco is the one he identifies most closely with his own taste. “Esco probably reflects my taste the most because it brings together food, music, atmosphere and community,” he says. “That’s really how I like to entertain and how I like people to feel when they walk into a space.”

It’s an answer that makes hospitality sound like a natural extension of what he has always done. Getting people into a room is one thing. Knowing what makes them want to stay requires a different kind of attention, and Epps traces his understanding of it back to his years on Atlanta’s mixtape circuit.

“Those years taught me how to create demand and how to build relationships before I ever had words for any of it,” he says. “I was figuring out how to get the music in the right hands, how to be in the right rooms, how to make genuine connections without immediately asking somebody for something.”

He still works that way. “I think hospitality is a big part of business. Make people feel comfortable, build real relationships, and the opportunities usually come from there.”

The résumé has expanded considerably since those mixtapes: a Grammy, No. 1 albums, multiplatinum singles, a recurring role on Starz’s BMF, and his debut as a writer and executive producer with the short film Red Clay. His memoir, The Voice in My Head Is God, added New York Times bestselling author to the list. Through it all, he helped carry Atlanta trap into the global mainstream, with a voice and a sense of humor that remained unmistakably his.

Photo Credit: Ben Draper

He has little use for the idea that the success arrived late. “People call it a late start, but I don’t see it that way,” he says. “I think I needed everything that happened before it.” That experience still informs his judgment, even as the opportunities have multiplied. He can give a project time to develop without waiting for someone else to tell him it’s his turn. Asked about advice he was right to ignore, he picks this: “Probably anybody who told me to wait. I’ve never been good at waiting on somebody else to tell me it’s my turn.”

That doesn’t mean he needs every new venture to announce another version of himself. The connection between the businesses, the music and his personal life is increasingly about how he wants to spend his time. He knows how much effort it takes to build something. He also wants to be able to turn his phone off occasionally.

His idea of an ideal getaway is refreshingly uncomplicated. “I like the West Coast. L.A., San Francisco, Hawaii, anywhere I can slow down a little bit and be near some water,” he says. “The perfect trip for me is really just no schedule, good food and my family. I don’t need to be in the middle of everything. I like being able to turn it off for a few days.”

No schedule may be the most revealing item on that list. There are plenty of ways to spend money on a holiday; allowing himself a few days without needing to be everywhere is its own pleasure. He and his son Halo have also been talking about a ski trip. That one is still on the list.

He will, presumably, pack the watches. “Probably more watches than I need” is his own assessment, although I suspect we could have a productive disagreement over need. Getting dressed remains a pleasure, and he gives it thought.

“I think more about where I’m going, what city I’m in, what kind of room I’m walking into,” he says. “I like wearing something people in that market might not have seen yet. It’s still self-expression, but now there’s more intention behind it. I dress for the game I’m attending.”

As for the bracelets: “I sleep in them. They’ve been through everything with me.”

There’s affection in that answer. He can appreciate what he already has while deciding that the next dollar belongs somewhere else. Investing in himself has become a broader proposition, one that includes businesses he cares about, people he wants to provide for and the ability to enjoy both. The jewelry still gets to come along.

Part Two

Photo Credit: Ben Draper

For all the things he has built, one of the clearest signs that life has changed arrived at a Falcons game, when Halo spotted Kyle Pitts.

“He’s yelling out to Kyle Pitts like they know each other. ‘Yo, Kyle! Yo, Kyle!’ No hesitation at all,” Epps says. “I had to grow into that kind of confidence. He already has it.”

The ease is what matters to him. His son can walk into a room, recognize someone he admires and assume he has every right to say hello. Epps knows what it took to become comfortable in those settings himself. Watching Halo start there gives him a way of measuring what his work has made possible.

“That made me realize how much exposure can change a child’s starting point,” he says. “He’s comfortable in rooms and around people that probably would’ve felt intimidating to me at his age. As a father, that lets me know some of what I’m trying to give my kids is actually showing up in them.”

His own childhood in College Park, Georgia, came with a much narrower set of options. He started playing basketball at seven at MLK. “I was hooping and trapping, sometimes in the same afternoon,” he says. Home meant water getting cut off, having to borrow lights, raids. The details can still arrive with the kind of humor that makes you laugh before you think about what you’ve just heard.

“I had a roach in the clock one time and couldn’t even tell what time it was,” he says. “Is that a seven or a one?”

“A lot of that stuff was just normal to us.”

Photo Credit: Ben Draper

He still sees that kid when he rides down Old National. “The biggest difference now is the options. Back then, it felt like hoop or trap. Now there’s more doors, and I want the next generation to see that.”

He also remembers assembling a school outfit from whatever was available in the family. “I had one polo I wore every Friday like it was a uniform. My kids don’t know that feeling, and that’s the point. That’s what I worked for.”

Giving them a different starting point still comes with responsibility. He wants them to understand what access means, how to appreciate it and how to create something of their own. There are limits, even in a household with considerably more resources than the one he grew up in.

“I tell them no sometimes on purpose because they need to know what no feels like,” he says. “I’d rather give them experiences and teach them how to build something than just keep buying them stuff. Invest over impress.”

On Me & Halo, the podcast he co-hosts with his son, those lessons become a conversation. The two trade perspectives on culture, family, music, money and everyday life, with room for Halo to develop his own voice. For Epps, the chance to have those exchanges is part of the appeal. “The podcast with Halo lets me have conversations I probably wouldn’t have had at his age,” he says.

Writing his memoir brought him back to his relationship with his own father. He had addressed it in songs, but there was more to explain than a verse could accommodate: “what it was like getting life lessons through collect calls and prison letters.”

While working on the book, he found letters his father had written in 2003. They contained the ordinary details people share to keep a relationship going: what he had eaten, football, the small exchanges that help fill a distance. On the outside of every envelope were three words: God is love.

“I don’t think I really understood that when I was younger,” Epps says. “Going back through those letters, it hit me different. God equals love. If it ain’t love, it ain’t God.”

His father was “that boys-don’t-cry type of man,” and also his best friend. His last words to his son were “Do it big, Epps.” Returning to those memories as an adult, with a family of his own, gave him another way to understand them. “Putting all of that on the page helped me understand him, and myself, in a deeper way,” he says.

That willingness to look closely shaped the memoir. So did the decision to leave certain things out. He weighed how to write about “some of the street stuff, some of the real raw details” without making other people pay for his candor.

“But I knew I wasn’t gonna write no cleaned-up version of my life,” he says. “The stuff I kept to myself was usually the stuff that could hurt somebody else more than it helped the story. Some things just ain’t only mine to tell.”

He approaches Red Clay with a similarly personal understanding of what an audience may not have seen. “I always describe my neighborhood like the zoo,” he says. “People would come through, get what they came for and leave, but I lived there. They didn’t see what happened after they left. That’s what I wanted to put on screen.”

Photo Credit: Ben Draper

Film offered time to stay with an experience. “In a song, I can tell you what something felt like. In a film, I can show you the look on a kid’s face when he realizes nobody is coming to save him. You can sit in that moment longer.”

The work on the memoir has carried into his next album, P.O.L.O. (Players Only Live Once), planned for the end of 2026. “For a long time, I was so focused on the next record, the next move, the next opportunity that I didn’t really stop and look at everything I had lived through and built,” he says. “The book made me do that.”

The new single, “Reign,” emerged from sessions where everyone was creatively locked in. He still wants that feeling. What has changed is how much he asks each record to settle about his place in the business.

“When I was younger, every record felt like it had to prove something. Prove I belonged, prove I could sell, prove I was supposed to be there. I don’t really move like that anymore.”

He works at night, when the people he loves are asleep and his phone has gone quiet. “I’m not moved by money the way I used to be. I’m moved by inspiration,” he says. “The younger me was always ready to go. Now I understand sometimes the best thing you can do is be still and listen.”

It’s a change in pace that extends to what he asks for in prayer. “I don’t really pray for money or hits. I pray for clarity. I pray for wisdom, for the right decisions for my family and everything I’m responsible for.”

Being able to make those decisions also means taking care of himself. In the memoir, he addresses the health consequences of his lean use and the moment his body made him reconsider. “Seeing those endoscopy results made it real for me,” he says. “I started thinking less about just working hard and more about being here for my wife and my kids.”

He eats differently, grows a lot of his own food and pays closer attention to what goes into his body. “I’m clearer, I’m more present,” he says. His explanation of exercise is one I suspect will outlive this article: “I’m not going to the gym for a game or to be on somebody’s cover. I’m going to the gym for life.”

The same thinking has changed his definition of ambition. “It’s about being around long enough to enjoy what I built and for my family to be able to depend on me.”

His children won’t necessarily understand every decision yet, and he is comfortable with that. Some of the pressure was his to carry. “They may look at certain things and wonder why I took a risk or why I worked the way I did, but they didn’t always see the pressure behind those decisions,” he says. “And I don’t necessarily want them to. That was part of the job.”

He hopes the book and the album will eventually help them understand why he made those choices. In the meantime, there are conversations to have with Halo, music to make in the quiet hours and that ski trip to figure out. Enjoying those things requires its own investment. He intends to be here for them.

Photo Credit: Ben Draper

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