Kanye West is a billionaire! Forbes puts net worth at $1.3B but says rapper is not as rich as he claims
Kanye West has been officially declared a billionaire by Forbes. It's been quite a while since Kanye West has been public about his billionaire status. He claimed this at the 2019 Fast Company Innovation Festival and people were far off from believing him.
"When I did Forbes, I showed them an $890 million receipt and they still didn’t say 'billionaire,'" Kanye said. It was reported that West had provided documents that were analyzed resulting in Forbes declaring that the mogul is a billionaire. Forbes said West's team had provided them an "an authentic numeric look into Kanye, Inc," allowing them to conclude that West has a net worth of $1.3 billion.
Forbes declared that the rapper and fashion designers' net worth is mostly credited to his athletic wear brand, Yeezy, and its partnership with Adidas. West is the sole owner of Yeezy, but the breakdown is a lot more complicated with a lot more zeros.
"West’s aggressive $3 billion self-appraisal is clearly based on the idea that the business is infinitely portable. It’s not. Taking Yeezy away from Adidas seems almost prohibitively cumbersome, if not contractually impossible," reported Forbes. "We tend to look at self-appraisals somewhat skeptically. Aside from the music, half of all this presumably belongs to his wife, although she’s no slouch and that math goes two ways. Given the illiquidity of these myriad assets and the lack of independent backup, we’re giving all of this a 50% haircut, leaving about $125 million in assets outside of his Yeezy crown jewel. Then, there’s debt: Between mortgages, advances and other liabilities, we saw about $100 million that West is on the hook for."
Forbes reported that the rapper's net worth results from "a $1.26 billion stake in athletic wear brand Yeezy, $17 million in cash, $35 million in stocks, $21 million in real estate, $3,845,162 worth of vehicles, $297,050 of livestock and $53 million in debt", divided between him and his wife, reality star Kim Kardashian. You would think that will all this under his belt and Forbes finally declaring him a billionaire, West would be content, but no. The mogul, however, refuses to believe that he's only worth $1.3 billion, claiming, "It’s not a billion. It’s $3.3 billion since no one at Forbes knows how to count."
Forbes ended its highly sarcastic piece with a jab, saying, "All told, our current net worth estimate for Kanye West: $1.3 billion, which he’ll be pleased to note is $300 million more than little sister Kylie."