Mike Tyson Told DJ Whoo Kid to “Leave Eminem the Fuck Alone.” Here Is Exactly What He Said and What We Could Not Verify.

No new beef, no new interview with Eminem himself. Just Mike Tyson, on someone else's show, making the case that people who dislike Eminem are really reacting to how much he changed the genre.

Mike Tyson sat down with DJ Whoo Kid for a wide-ranging conversation posted this week, titled "Mike Tyson On Getting In A Boxing Match With 50 Cent, His Respect For Eminem, Netflix Doc & More." Partway through, Tyson turned a question about Eminem into an extended defense of him, which eminem.news first reported under the headline "Mike Tyson Defends Eminem: 'Leave Him the Fuck Alone.'"

DJ Whoo Kid's full sit-down with Mike Tyson. We verified the video through YouTube's own oEmbed listing: DJ WHOO KID's channel, that exact title.

What Tyson said, as quoted by eminem.news

As quoted by eminem.news, Tyson opened on a note of plain affection before getting into anything pointed:

Mike Tyson: "Wish him happiness, man. All we need is happiness. We could do anything after that."

Mike Tyson: "I respect him as much as possible. He's a good man. He's respectable."

He then explained why he keeps his own distance, tying it to the volume of attention Eminem draws and, by his account, his own relationship with being watched that closely:

Mike Tyson: "I hate bothering him."

The line that became the eminem.news headline came when Tyson turned to the people who do not like Eminem. His argument, as reported, is that the resentment is really about influence: that Eminem rearranged the rules of the genre enough that some people never forgave him for it.

Mike Tyson: "Eminem doesn't have to say nobody's name. He knows when he says somebody's name, they're gonna get love." "He's changed the game." "Leave him the fuck alone."

Tyson also ran through a short list of favorite Eminem moments and collaborations, naming a Jay-Z record, "Lose Yourself," a song with Lil Wayne, and the Notorious B.I.G. collaboration "Dead Wrong," and closed with a self-deprecating "I'm learning" about hip hop generally. eminem.news's writeup also notes Tyson joking about sending Eminem weed, and Tyson making a comment about Eminem's race in the context of why some people resent him; we are not reproducing that line here because we could not independently pull the audio to confirm the exact wording, and it is the kind of remark where exact phrasing changes the meaning.

The boxing match and the Netflix doc

The video's own title promises two other threads: a discussion of Tyson getting in the ring with 50 Cent, and Tyson's new Netflix documentary. Tyson and 50 Cent have a long, public history, from 50's cameo in a sparring session filmed for his own reality show years ago, and Tyson has talked before about how friendships change once someone actually steps into a boxing ring with him. None of that is new to this interview, and the eminem.news piece does not go deep on it, so we are not speculating about what Tyson said in that section beyond the title's own description.

The Netflix angle lines up with a real, dated release: Tyson, a four-part documentary series on his life and career directed by Floyd Russ, premiered October 13, 2026, one day before this interview was reported. That gives the conversation an obvious hook independent of anything about Eminem, and likely explains why Tyson was doing press at all this week.

How this fits the pattern

This is at least the third time in two weeks that eminem.news has reported on a DJ Whoo Kid sit-down where a guest was asked directly about Eminem. Quavo named three favorite Eminem songs on the same show and got a live collaboration pitch out of it. Around the same stretch, Tech N9ne talked through being replaced by Eminem on a J.I.D. record, and Lil Wayne admitted on his own podcast that Eminem's lines make him jealous. Whoo Kid's history with Eminem's camp runs back more than two decades through Shade 45, which is part of why his guests keep getting asked, and keep answering.

Tyson's own history with Eminem predates all of it. The two have known each other since at least 2020, when Tyson appeared on his own podcast with Eminem as a guest, a conversation eminem.news has covered before. Whatever Tyson meant by "leave him the fuck alone," it reads less like a response to any specific recent attack and more like a running theme for him: that criticism of Eminem is proxy criticism for his success, dressed up as something else.

50 Cent has also been in the news around Eminem again this month, telling the Associated Press at the Street Fighter premiere that Eminem stepped back from the film's theme song because his own next album is getting close. Tyson's comments add no new information about that album, but they land in the same week as a reminder of how much goodwill still surrounds Eminem inside his own circle of friends, even from people who rarely talk about him publicly.

What we could not verify

We confirmed the video exists, under the title above, on DJ Whoo Kid's channel, through YouTube's own oEmbed listing. We did not independently transcribe the full interview ourselves, so the quotes above are attributed to eminem.news's reporting rather than claimed as our own verification, and we deliberately left out the one line involving Eminem's race because we could not confirm its exact wording from the primary source. We found no statement from Eminem or his camp responding to Tyson's comments, and no confirmation tying Tyson's "happiness" remark to any specific occasion. Until a transcript or a response from Eminem's side surfaces, treat this as Tyson's own unprompted defense, nothing more.