anye West has been arguing for years that he’s a billionaire. Forbes disagreed. That’s until last Friday (April 24, 2020). After months of requests, the hip-hop icon revealed his financial records to Forbes. Now, Forbes finally recognized the billionaire Kanye West.
Last summer, Kanye West was interviewed by Forbes and featured on the cover of their august edition. At first, he was happy to receive the honor and publicly promote the success of his fashion brand- Yeezy. But as time went on, Kanye grew restless with Forbes “snubbing” his billionaire status. “I showed them a $890 million receipt, and they still didn’t say ‘billionaire,’” he told an industry panel.
One year later, Forbes releases its annual edition of the world’s newest billionaires “The Richest in 2020”. But still without providing documentation, Kanye remained omitted from the list. “To ask me to somehow translate this to numbers is to ask your grandmother exactly what the recipe of the cake was.”
With his sister-in-law Kylie Jenner being featured once again, Kanye became increasingly restless and hostile.
“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 “part of a group of media” that was trying to suppress his self-made narrative because of his race.
Yesterday, there was finally a breakthrough. West had his team provide financial documents to Forbes. Finally granting him billionaire status.
Although you might believe he made his fortune dropping album after album, you’d be wrong. In fact, being the 100% owner of Yeezy is the crown jewel granting him that treasured “B”. In royalties alone, Adidas pays Kanye West over $140 Million a year in royalties to use the Yeezy name. In comparison, his record label G.O.O.D. is only worth $90 million.
After combing through his records, Forbes found items like: $3 million in cars, $300,000 in livestock, and over $100 million in debt. Kanye West is officially worth a whopping $1.3 Billion, $300 million more than Kylie.
