Kanye West Is Officially a Billionaire Worth $1.3 Billion, Forbes Releases Shady Article After Reviewing the Numbers | lovebscott.com

Kanye West Is Officially a Billionaire Worth $1.3 Billion, Forbes Releases Shady Article After Reviewing the Numbers

Kanye West is a billionaire.

He’s been saying it for a while, but according to a shady article written by Forbes the publication was just recently able to review Kanye’s financials after he popped off privately via text about not being including in their latest ‘Billionaires’ list.

Here’s what Forbes had to say:

When we featured West on the cover of Forbes last summer, delving into his incredible success with Yeezy, he seemed pleased at first. His world-famous wife, Kim Kardashian West, even tweeted her congratulations, to the positive affirmations of 32,300 of their closest Twitter friends. But without sufficient documentation on his unusual stake, versus just his word and industry guesstimates, we didn’t call him a billionaire. And that grated on him. As the year wore on, he protested publicly. (“I showed them a $890 million receipt, and they still didn’t say ‘billionaire,’” he told an industry panel, about something that no one at Forbes remembers.) In private, he was more biting. (A “disrespectful article,” he texted this week, that was “purposely snubbing me.”)

When our annual billionaires list appeared earlier this month, again with West absent—still no documentation, and now a pandemic to boot—West again reacted with hurt and venom. “You know what you’re doing,” he texted. “You’re toying with me and I’m not finna lye [sic] down and take it anymore in Jesus name.” At one point, he texted that Forbes was “purposely a part of a group of media” that was trying to suppress his self-made narrative because of his race. That sister-in-law Kylie Jenner did make the list also clearly stuck in his craw.

The piece went on explaining how they were able to finally do the math and believe that Kanye West is worth $1.3 billion — not the 3 billion he claims.

Three things became clear from this exercise. First, it reinforces why we put him on the cover in the first place—West, in just a few years, has created a brand that’s challenging Nike’s Air Jordan for sneaker world supremacy. It’s one of the great retail stories of the century.

Second, it reinforced that West, who claims both in words and in this paperwork that he’s worth more than $3 billion, is as overly boastful as his political idol, President Donald Trump. Not a numbers guy? We agree.

Finally, and perhaps most critically to West, it does confirm, based on our estimates, that his stake in Yeezy indeed makes him a billionaire. A bit over $1 billion, actually.

In the process, we can now share more details about Yeezy than ever before revealed—as well as some insight into what drives this extremely creative, extremely enigmatic ten-digit artist.

Yeezy is a complicated asset. West owns 100% of it. But it’s functionally tied, at least for five-plus years based on the documents we saw, to Adidas, which produces, markets and distributes the shoes. There’s also a separate apparel division that we don’t believe makes money. Last year, our sources projected the shoes would finish 2019 with revenue north of $1.5 billion (Adidas would not comment then, or now)—per recent conversations and internal documents, we believe the final revenue number ended up closer to $1.3 billion.

As expected, a massive chunk of his wealth comes from his successful Yeezy. By Forbes’ calculations, he receives royalties of 15% from Adidas and that earned him about $140 million from Yeezy sales last year alone.

If you care to read the rest, the piece dives deeper into how they arrived at Kanye’s $1.3 billion valuation (music, assets, etc). You’ll find it here.

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