Jay-Z’s MarcyPen Is Reportedly Weeks From Co-Owning Fenty Beauty With Rihanna

Jay-Z once needed a single day to sign Rihanna to Def Jam. Twenty-one years later, his investment firm is reportedly close to becoming her partner in Fenty Beauty.

MarcyPen Capital Partners, the firm Jay-Z co-founded, is nearing a deal to buy LVMH’s 50 percent stake in Rihanna’s beauty brand, Puck reported on Sept. 30. A source close to the deal told Puck it could be signed within three to four weeks, closing a sale process LVMH started nearly a year ago, Hypebeast reports. Terms haven’t been disclosed, and neither MarcyPen nor Roc Nation executive Jay Brown responded to Puck.

Read moreTom Morello’s Power to the People Ends With Springsteen, Grohl and a Protest-Song Jam

Puck flagged the scoop on X:

If it closes, Fenty Beauty would be owned 50-50 by Rihanna and a firm co-founded by Jay-Z. LVMH has held the other half since the brand launched in 2017 through Kendo Brands, its beauty incubator. That launch, built on 40 foundation shades, made Fenty one of the most successful celebrity-backed beauty brands and, in Hypebeast’s words, made shade inclusivity “a baseline expectation” across the industry.

MarcyPen wouldn’t be walking in cold. It formed in 2024, when Jay-Z’s Marcy Venture Partners merged with Pendulum Opportunities, the investment firm run by D’Rita and Robbie Robinson, and Marcy Venture Partners had already backed Savage X Fenty, Rihanna’s lingerie label, in funding rounds in 2019 and 2022. Jay Brown sits on both sides of the table: he’s a MarcyPen co-founder, and XXL credits him as a co-founder of Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty, too.

The relationship predates every one of those companies. “I signed her in one day,” Jay-Z, then Def Jam’s president, told Rolling Stone in 2005. “It took me two minutes to see she was a star.” She signed with his Roc Nation for management in 2010, then moved to its label in 2014, Complex reported at the time.

The price is the big unknown. When Reuters first reported, in October 2025, that LVMH was exploring a sale with the bank Evercore advising, its sources valued the whole company at $1 billion to $2 billion, on about $450 million in 2024 net sales, HotNewHipHop recaps. By June, AFROTECH was reporting that MarcyPen was in the running and weighing several ways to finance a deal, including talks with outside investors, per Black Enterprise.

The talks land in a busy season for the brand. In September, Fenty replaced Pro Filt’r, the foundation it launched with in 2017, with a reformulated Pro Filt’r Fluid Flex that Rihanna called the brand’s “rebirth,” Cosmetics Business reports. On Tuesday (Oct. 6), she hosted a Fenty Beauty livestream on TikTok, where a fan’s question about unreleased music got the answer of the week: “at least 17 vaults.”

Nothing is signed yet, and none of the three parties has announced a deal. If Puck’s source has the timing right, that changes before November.