Kanye West Is Officially A Billionaire
Kanye West is officially a billionaire, Forbes reports. Congrats, Kanye! Now you shouldn’t exist!
To be fair, Kanye has probably already been a billionaire for a while. He absolutely has been, if you ask him. When last year’s Forbes cover story failed to refer to him as a billionaire due to a lack of sufficient documentation, he texted the author saying it was a “disrespectful article” that was “purposely snubbing me.”
“Martin Luther King didn’t get killed because he had a dream; he had something else he was going to talk about. He talked about black empowerment, economic empowerment,” Kanye told an industry panel last year. “When I did Forbes, I showed them a $890 million receipt and they still didn’t say ‘billionaire.’ They don’t want us to know that we can buy land; they don’t want us to have the 100 percent ownership [that] I have at Yeezy. … When people say it’s crass to call yourself a billionaire, I say I might legally change my name to Christian Genius Billionaire Kanye West for a year until y’all understand exactly what it is … It will be on the license plate.”
When Forbes released their annual billionaires list earlier this month, Christian Genius Billionaire Kanye West still wasn’t on it. His little sister-in-law Kylie Jenner, however, was. And once again, he texted Forbes about it directly. “You know what you’re doing. You’re toying with me and I’m not finna lye [sic] down and take it anymore in Jesus name,” Kanye said, accusing the magazine of being “part of a group of media” trying to suppress his self-made narrative because of his race.
But now, Kanye has apparently come through with the receipts. Yesterday, he finally directed his team to provide what Forbes describes as “an authentic numeric look into Kanye, Inc.” And although Forbes says that he’s not actually worth more than $3 billion, as he claims, his stake in Yeezy does in fact make him a billionaire. Their current net worth estimate is $1.3 billion, $300 million more than Kylie Jenner.
“It’s not a billion,” West texted Forbes last night. “It’s $3.3 billion since no one at Forbes knows how to count.”