It now seems that Jay-Z was never backing Occupy activists. “I’m not going to a park and picnic – I have no idea what to do,” he recalled telling Russell Simmons, a hip-hop mogul who was a prominent Occupy supporter. “I think all those things need to really declare themselves a bit more clearly because when you just say that ‘the one percent is that,’ that’s not true.”

Jay-Z, who is worth an estimated $460m, said it was wrong to fight against entrepreneurs. “Yeah, the one per cent that’s robbing people, and deceiving people, these fixed mortgages and all these things, and then taking their home away from them, that’s criminal, that’s bad,” he told Zadie Smith in the Times. “[But it’s] not [bad] being an entrepreneur. This is free enterprise. This is what America is built on.”