Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. Photo : John Sommers II ( Getty Images )

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear held a news conference Monday night and had an ace up his sleeve: He was going to talk about people filing for unemployment benefits using fake names, and he had a name that everyone knew was faker than the Trump presidency.




“We had somebody apply for unemployment for Tupac Shakur here in Kentucky,” the governor said, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Everyone knows that Tupac was murdered in 1996. Everyone.

“And that person may have thought they were being funny,” Beshear said. “Except for the fact that because of them, we had to go through so many other claims.”


There was only one problem: Tupac Shakur is alive and well and unemployed and is going to need the governor to put some respek on his name and run him his unemployment check.

Tupac Shakur is a 46-year-old Lexington resident who filed for government benefits after losing his job during the coronavirus pandemic. Shakur worked as a cook at Alfalfa’s and Lynagh’s in Lexington before coronavirus came and shut shit down. He legally changed his name in the 1990s and picked Shakur because it means “thankful to God” in Arabic, the Herald-Leader reports.

“I’m hurt, I’m really embarrassed and I’m shocked,” he told the Herald-Leader.



Shakur doesn’t go by Tupac; he actually uses his middle name Malik because of the obvious. He told the newspaper that the governor reached out to him to apologize and Shakur accepted and let the governor know to “Keep Ya Head Up.”


“I understand, he’s dealing with a lot,” he told the paper. “Mistakes happen.”