Meet Ice Cube, the rapper turned Hollywood player

Judging from Ice Cube’s reaction when he’s called a ”mogul,” you’d think the word had four letters instead of five. ”’Mogul’ just sounds too corporate to me,” says the 33-year-old gangsta rapper-turned-actor, turned producer. ”It sounds like I should be on Wall Street selling funny money. Those titles don’t do anything for me.”

Maybe his refusal to be labeled a mogul is a brilliant, counterintuitive strategy; in effect, it makes him seem like even more of a mogul. Because if you skim any of those Sun Tzu-inspired power manuals that are so popular in Hollywood’s corner offices, you’ll see that deflecting praise is actually a fairly clever ploy. In fact, in Robert Greene’s 1998 master-of-the-universe guide, ”The 48 Laws of Power,” it’s Law No. 30: Make Your Accomplishments Seem Effortless. Cube says he hasn’t relied on this particular book to chart his career. But as you’ll see, it’s a manual that he could easily have written.

Ice Cube’s Career Guide…