50 Cent's Reebok G-Unit G6 is gone from Reebok.com, and the rapper's read on why is that the shoe was never really about nostalgia.
The retro returned Thursday, Aug. 20, at 10 a.m. ET for $130 through Reebok.com and select retailers, in the same white, blue and red colorway that launched in 2003. Footwear News reported that Reebok's own inventory cleared in under two hours. In a brief email interview the outlet published the following day, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson said the demand tracked with what he felt at the original launch. "I knew we had something big," he told Footwear News, adding that seeing people still excited more than two decades later is remarkable to him.
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Asked what the G6 got right that most celebrity sneakers of that era got wrong, Jackson pointed to how involved he was — that he worked on the design and the marketing rather than putting his name on someone else's shoe, and that buyers can tell the difference.
Asked whether he would change anything designing it fresh in 2026, he said the response answered the question: the sellout showed the design held up. He allowed that he might have fun with new colors and different versions, but said he would leave the original alone. That is the closest thing to a forward-looking signal in the interview. Reebok has not announced additional colorways, a second drop or a restock.
The 2026 release is a faithful reissue rather than a refresh. It carries a white leather upper, a gray suede toe cap, red, white and blue accents at the forefoot and heel, a silver G6 lace dubrae, a tri-color heel tab, "G-Unit" embroidered in blue on the lateral heel, and an icy translucent outsole over a rubber midsole. Reebok offered it in unisex sizes 3.5 through 13 plus a size 14, limited to one pair per customer.
One caveat worth keeping straight: a sellout on Reebok's site is not the same as a sellout everywhere. JD Sports and other stockists received pairs, and availability at those retailers moved on its own timeline. Pairs also surfaced quickly on secondary marketplaces, where listings were asking meaningfully above the $130 retail price.
The original G6 arrived in 2003 alongside Jackson's debut album, "Get Rich or Die Tryin'," making him one of the first rappers to front a signature sneaker line rather than simply appear in a campaign. It shared shelf space at Reebok with Jay-Z's S. Carter, an arrangement that effectively pitted two hip-hop deals against each other inside the same building. Jackson has claimed for years that the G6 outsold the S. Carter six to one and that the partnership generated roughly $80 million at its peak — figures he has repeated in interviews, and which Reebok has not confirmed.
Announcing the reissue, Jackson said in a Reebok statement that "the G-Unit sneaker represents a special time in my career and in hip-hop," describing its influence on sneaker culture as still visible. Reebok chief executive Todd Krinsky framed the return as a way to reintroduce a model that helped bridge court-inspired footwear and street style for a new audience.
For a Y2K revival cycle that has spent three years recycling silhouettes with thin cultural claims attached, the G6 is an unusually literal test case: a shoe that mattered commercially the first time, reissued without modernization, and cleared in a morning. Jackson, now 51, spent the week treating that as vindication rather than surprise.
