It’s Sunday, the day reserved for paying attention to Kanye West, and today there’s a big reason why we’re paying attention to him… or, to be more accurate, there’s a billion reasons why we’re paying attention to him: According to a Forbes profile, Kanye West is officially—he has the documentation to prove it—a billionaire. Now, that on its own would not be a story, because nobody should give a shit about whatever dragon’s hoard Kanye West sleeps on, but what’s worth talking about here is that there is one person for whom Kanye West’s bank account is actually an interesting subject, and that person (you’re never going to believe this) is none other than Kanye West himself.
Apparently, there was some extremely upper-class drama last year when Forbes published a cover story last year all about West and how successful his Yeezy brand is, with the story specifically refusing to identify West as a billionaire despite his assurances that he did definitely have more than $1 billion. So, for a fucking year, Kanye West reportedly complained about the slight, apparently texting the Forbes writer that it was a “disrespectful article” that was “purposefully snubbing” him, possibly because of his race and possibly because Forbes belongs to a “group of media” that is trying to keep him down. But now, evidently within the last few days, West presented Forbes with sufficient paperwork to prove that he has—at least in terms of assets and not actual money in the bank—over a $1 billion. West apparently texted the Forbes writer that it’s actually “$3.3 billion since no one at Forbes knows how to count,” but Forbes is employing its “Trump rule” in this case (take whatever he says, divide by three, and investigate from there). So it’s probably at least $1 billion, but anything more than that is harder to prove.
To Forbes’ credit, it actually brings up the Trump angle a few times in its story about West’s induction in the Three Commas Club, correctly recognizing that the idea of a rich person being extremely invested in everyone else knowing how rich they are is about as Trumpy as you can get without instructing people to start putting bleach in their veins. Also, the piece itself is kind of interesting for people who want to know where West’s money comes from and how his 100 percent ownership of Yeezy doesn’t necessarily mean what it sounds like, which we’re going to guess is an audience that is exclusively limited to people who already read Forbes.
So yeah, congratulations to Kanye West on having more money than any one man realistically needs to have and for pressing this issue in the middle of a global pandemic that has seen 26 million Americans file for unemployment.