Daymond John walked into a recording studio around the year 2000 and found Michael Jackson at work. The FUBU founder, known today as one of the investors on ABC’s Shark Tank, has told the story on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and a recap posted on his own website, DaymondJohn.com, in November 2025 sets out what he remembered from meeting the singer: Michael’s creative process, a sweet tooth and one very unusual way of checking his own work.
The sweet tooth came first. The recap describes Michael’s “energy-boosting Reese’s Pieces habit.” He wasn’t snacking for fun. The candy was fuel.
To see why that night meant so much to Daymond, you have to know how far he’d come to get there. According to the same recap, FUBU grew “from a basement operation into a cultural movement.” He mortgaged his home, closed the business more than once and walked onto rap video sets to get artists to wear FUBU shirts, often taking the same shirt back after filming so he could use it again. Plenty of people believed FUBU was a huge clothing company long before it was one, while Daymond was still waiting tables at Red Lobster.
Then there was the photo. Michael Jackson was photographed wearing FUBU, which the recap calls “one of the only times the artist was ever seen in a branded clothing line.” For a label that started in a basement, it’s hard to think of a bigger name to land.
Michael, meanwhile, was making new music. His album Invincible would come out in October 2001, and like any artist sitting on fresh songs, he wanted to know whether they actually worked on ordinary listeners. The trouble was obvious. Michael Jackson couldn’t stand on a corner, play a tape and ask passers-by what they thought. The moment anyone recognized him, the honest reaction was gone, and nobody would give him a straight answer.
So he found a way to go unnoticed.
Here’s how Daymond’s website puts it: Michael “would anonymously roll through Harlem in a wheelchair with a transistor radio to gauge public reaction to new music.” The biggest pop star in the world rolled through the streets of Harlem in a wheelchair. On the radio were his newest songs. Around him were people who had no idea that the man in the chair, listening to them listen, was the one who’d made the music.
It’s market research at its most basic, and it’s a method Daymond, who sizes up other people’s products for a living on Shark Tank, can appreciate. Michael didn’t want the opinion of an executive or a friend in the studio who might tell him what he wanted to hear. He wanted the reaction of a stranger who heard a song for the first time, with nothing to gain by being polite.
Notice the word the recap uses, too. Michael “would” roll through Harlem. That points to something he did more than once, not a single night’s adventure.
Daymond told the story as Shark Tank headed into its 17th season, in the same appearance where he named Bombas, the sock company that donates a pair for every pair sold, as his most successful investment on the show. Bombas, he said, is the number one product across all 54 editions of Shark Tank around the world.
The radio in the story was a transistor, the small kind people carried before phones did that job for them. Nobody passing it on those Harlem sidewalks knew whose songs were coming out of it.