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E-40: Turning His Money Over, One Hustle at a Time

Inside the Bay Area legend's new 40-song quadruple album — and the entrepreneurial empire that's been building alongside it for over a decade

Typographic graphic for E-40, lettering in Rap·Hip-Hop gold

40 songs. 4 discs. 1 independent hustle.

Since 2013, E-40's Earl Stevens Selections has grown into 17+ wines, six spirits lines, and two food brands — built, by his own account, with zero outside investors.

Three decades into a career most artists would've long since wound down, E-40 just did the opposite: he dropped a 40-song quadruple album. Turning My Money Over arrived August 28, split into four themed 10-track discs — Once, Twice, Thrice, and Cuatro — and stacked with guests spanning eras and coasts, from Bay Area mainstays Too $hort and cousin B-Legit to Larry June, Juvenile, Busta Rhymes, Anderson .Paak, and Killer Mike. He announced it himself in typically unbothered fashion, telling fans simply that the greatest game spitter of all time is back. It's the kind of scale that would read as excess from almost anyone else. From E-40, it reads as pace — the same pace he's kept since 1992, when Vallejo's most prolific voice started building a catalog that now ranks among the deepest in Hip-Hop.


But the album is really only half the story of what E-40's been building. Since 2013, he's poured that same restless energy into a business empire that's grown almost as large as his discography. What started as a single wine, named after himself, is now a full portfolio under his Earl Stevens Selections label: 17-plus still and sparkling wines, E. Cuarenta Tequila, Tycoon Cognac, two whiskey-adjacent spirits in Kuiper Belt Bourbon and Kuiper Belt Gin, Tycoon Vodka, the Sluricane cocktail line, and a golden lager. Off the drinks side, there's Goon With The Spoon (sausages, burritos, ice cream) and The Lumpia Company, the Filipino food business he co-owns that now runs a restaurant in Oakland, a stand inside the Giants' Oracle Park, and a food truck in San Francisco. He's said as much himself: "We family-owned. Black-owned business for real from the ground up," E-40 said on The Breakfast Club. "I'm talking about no investors. No nothing."


The word tying it all together — tycoon — isn't incidental. It's one of his. As he told Forbes, the name wasn't invented, just repurposed: "Of course it has always been in the dictionary, but nobody was screaming tycoon until I was screaming tycoon on numerous records." That's the pattern with E-40's vocabulary generally, and it's worth pausing on for one line: he was calling weed "broccoli" as far back as 1993, on "Practice Lookin' Hard" — years before the term resurfaced and sparked arguments over who said it first. Money got its own word from him too: scrilla.


Turning My Money Over works as a title for both halves of what he does — the music and the businesses run on the same hustle, and thirty-some years in, neither shows any sign of slowing down.

Sources & further Reading

A note on this article: This piece was researched and drafted with Funknuz AI, then edited, fact-checked, and finalized by our editorial team. All sourcing is linked above.

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