What started as a fun weekend project between three Yale classmates to translate rap lyrics for the common man has attracted millions in investments. Early last week, tech investment firm Andreessen Horowitz put $15 million into the site Rap Genius, created three years ago by friends Mahbod Moghadam, Tom Lehman, and Ilan Zechory. Thrown together as ‘something you can look at in your dorm, when you’re on drugs,’ as one founder put it, the site now attracts up to 500,000 pageviews a day. Trailing pornography and Facebook, lyrics are among the most searched content on the internet. The site takes lyrics and allows users to annotate the language and explain its real meaning, much as literary scholars would do with a classic novel. For instance, rapper Jay-Z’S song 99 Problems is revealed to explore the artist’s complicated relationships between himself, the law, money, media, and men of low character. That song contains the lyrics ‘Got two choices y’all, pull over the car or / Bounce on the devil, put the pedal to the floor,’ which could be totally misinterpreted if one was unfamiliar with rap idioms and metaphor. Rap Genius users have translated the phrase to mean ‘Jay is unsure whether he ought to cooperate with the police trying to pull him over, or to try to run away. The ‘devil’ here is, of course, the White Devil.’ Rap lyrics make up 90 per cent of the site’s content but users have added annotations for text as varied as science papers, poetry, the Great Gatsby, and even Pres. Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union Address. While most sites feature a white background with black text, Rap Genius has a black background with blue, orange, and white text because its creators believed it was more ‘chill.’ Many rappers and celebrities use the site themselves, founders said. Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is a frequent visitor. ‘It changes so fast, it’s exploding,’ Zechory told Business Insider. ’It’s literally millions of unique visitors. In a year from now it will be the biggest site in the whole internet. Andreessen Horowitz has a history of picking winners. The firm was one of the early investors in Twitter, and Forbes ranked them 10th on the magazine’s 2011 Forbes Midas List of Tech’s Top Investors. ‘I often wonder how the Internet would have turned out differently if users had been able to annotate everything – to add new layers of knowledge to all knowledge, on and on, ad infinitum,’ Marc Andreessen, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, wrote on Rap Genius. ‘And so, 20 years later, Rap Genius finally gives us the opportunity to find out. It’s an ambitious mission, and one we are proud to get behind’

The sudden unexpected decrease in Facebook stock has deprived founder Mark Zuckerberg of almost half of his $17.5 billion net worth. Now only worth $9.4 billion, Zuckerberg has reportedly lost $8.1 billion over the past 12 months. According to Forbes magazine, the stock price of Facebook has fallen to below $20 a share due to an array of law suits and recriminations that have dealt long-term damage to the once immortal business investment. Formerly a dominant, highly ranked figure on the Forbes list of 400 Richest Americans, Zuckerberg has apparently lost more money than anybody else on this list, moving from 14th to 36th place. This is quite a dramatic turn of events considering Zuckerberg was last year’s highest earner on that same list when he added $10.6 billion to his fortune. While Forbes still cites Zuckerberg’s personal fortune as “impressive,” the magazine reports a net loss of $15.7 million in July alone, cementing the grave status of Facebook’s stock prices. Forbes said: ‘The drop isn’t likely to change the hoodie-wearing CEO’s lifestyle much. ‘What’s less clear: whether the young executive, who married his long-time girlfriend Priscilla Chan the day after the (floatation) and headed off for an Italian honeymoon, can right the ship and make Facebook into a winning public company.’ In a recent speech meant to reflect on the loss, Zuckerberg explained himself by saying that the company didn’t put didn’t put enough focus on mobile devices in the past two years. To protect himself from the damage he claims he didn’t see coming, Zuckerberg had already offloaded $1.1 billion of his own shares. While many institutional investors have done the same, Zuckerberg is being personally sued for $2.9 billion for not informing smaller shareholders of his concerns. Remaining at the top of the Forbes list was Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his $66 billion fortune, followed by investor Warren Buffet’s $46 billion. The biggest rise in rank this year was Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle. He jumped from $8 to $41 billion this year. Forbes explains Ellison’s hefty increase with getting rid of unprofitable parts of his business, despite the fact that he did spend $500 million to purchase the Hawaiian island of Lana’i. Rising values in art works, real estate, and several stock market prices contributed to an increase in the combined wealth of America’s richest from $1.5 trillion to $1.7 trillion, according to Forbes.