Jay Z’s luxury cannabis company goes up in smoke after struggling to sell $50 joints

Jay-Z’s cannabis brand Monogram appears to be in trouble: Gamblers are reluctant to pay $50 for one of its luxury joints and the company has lost half a billion dollars since launching to much fanfare in 2020.

The “Empire State of Mind” rapper, aka Shawn Carter, is celebrated as a savvy businessman, but his stylish pot company is floundering — like many others who braved California’s tough legal weed market.

Monogram’s website lists nine retailers in California and Arizona that it says stock its wares. But none of them currently list any of the Jay-Z-approved buds or joints on their online menus.

Meanwhile, the conglomerate behind it, The Parent Company (TPCO), has burned through most of its $575 million launch coffers and merged with another company, which also appears to be in financial trouble, according to the numbers. SFGAAT.

Legal weed experts say breaking into California’s tough market has been much harder than many investors expected, and that Jay-Z’s Monogram products are overpriced and underwhelming.

The Golden State’s legal marijuana industry has been hampered by complex regulations, high taxes, competition from black market traders, wildfires and falling prices, leaving many growers in financial trouble and insolvency.

Monogram did not return DailyMail.com’s request for comment.

Seth Yakatan, a cannabis investor and advisor to many California pot companies, told SFGATE he wasn’t surprised by TPCO’s troubles because it spent “mind-boggling” amounts of money pushing products that get bad reviews.

“Like a lot of things we’ve seen in cannabis surrounding rappers, the hype hasn’t matched the reality,” Yakatan said.

“Monogram is said to be an ultra-premium product, and I don’t know anyone who has tried it and thought it was anything more than a mediocre product.”

The launch of Monogram was one of the biggest cannabis business news stories of the decade.

TPCO was a merger of three existing cannabis companies. It went public in 2020 with control of 20 separate retail brands, multiple grow houses and a network of stores across California.

Jay-Z was named C-suite executive – the chief visionary officer – at TPCO. The 54-year-old billionaire rapper’s Monogram brand was the company’s luxury offering.

It sells pre-rolled ‘loosies’ and cannabis buds in stylish black packaging. The ‘OG Handrolls’ cost an eye-watering $50 – much higher than the $5 weed smokers are used to paying.

The launch included a photo shoot at the famed Frank Sinatra house in Palm Springs, with models elegantly puffing their joints in front of mid-century pool furniture.

This earned the incipient brand attention in GQ, Vogue and Vanity Fair.

TPCO board member Michael Aurbach boasted at the time that they would “dominate and consolidate the market” because it had such deep pockets.

“It will be difficult for any smaller player to compete with us,” Aurbach said.

From the start, the newcomer struggled to convince consumers to overspend on products that didn’t live up to the hype.

A GQ review complained that monogram joints wouldn’t stay lit for “more than a few seconds.”

In its initial listing, TPCO said it expected $334 million in its first year – sky-high profits that didn’t materialize.

TPCO reported a shocking net loss of $587 million in 2022, apparently the result of buying overvalued brands, and its stock price plummeted.

The following year, a struggling TPCO merged with another California pot company, Gold Flora. But it only had a 49 percent minority stake in the newly created company.

It appears that Jay-Z parted ways with TPCO around that time.

Stock exchange documents show that Monogram exited TPCO in December 2022, even though Gold Flora remains the exclusive seller of Monogram products in California.

Gold Flora appears to have stopped selling Jay-Z’s products and is having its own financial problems.

The company did not respond to DailyMail.com’s request for comment.

According to the Green Market Report, the country has suffered about $56 million in losses this year and has more debt than assets.

Coastal Sun, a cannabis farm in Santa Cruz, sued Gold Flora earlier this month for about $20,000 over unpaid bills.

Coastal Sun chief financial officer Darren Story says Gold Flora appears to be in a “debt death spiral”.

Green Market Report says Gold Flora could be the next company to join the ‘conga line to receivership and bankruptcy’.

The struggles of Jay-Z’s pot business are in stark contrast to the success he enjoyed as CEO of Def Jam Recordings and founder of Roc Nation in the 2000s.

During his 2021 speech, he said he was motivated to intervene in the marijuana market to get more Black people into the industry.

People of color had been disproportionately punished for involvement with the drug where it is illegal, but made up only a small number of those profiting from the multi-billion dollar legal pot market, he lamented.

“It’s really unbelievable how that can happen,” he said.

“We are the ones who have been most negatively affected by the war on drugs, and America has turned around and turned it into a company worth billions.”