KANYE WEST. After making anti-Semitic remarks on Twitter, rapper Kanye West, let go by Adidas and other brands, saw his fortune amputated.
[Mis à jour le 26 octobre 2022 à 10h15] Kanye West will have lost his billionaire status. According to the specialized site Forbes, the rapper would now have a fortune estimated at 400 million dollars, while his collaboration with Adidas, which has just put an end to their partnership, represented 1.5 billion dollars. The same source estimates that the rest of his fortune, estimated at $400 million, came from his real estate resources, his copyrights and income related to his music and his 5% share in the clothing company of his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian.
A new blow for Kanye West, who suffers the consequences of his anti-Semitic remarks. “After careful consideration, the company has made the decision to immediately end the partnership with Ye,” Adidas said in a statement on Tuesday (October 25). “Adidas does not tolerate anti-Semitism or any other form of hate speech,” he added. The German sports equipment manufacturer joins the list of brands that have decided to move away from Kanye West, after his anti-Semitic remarks on Twitter: Balanciaga and Vogue had led the way, and the artist was banned from Twitter and Instagram, in addition to to have been boycotted by the Grammy Awards and canceled from the Coachella festival.
The end of his collaboration with Adidas is a blow for Kanye West, who had developed his famous Yeezy sneakers with the brand since 2014. A fruitful partnership, which had made him a billionaire. Monday October 24, the famous American agency of lawyers CAA, which represents Kanye West, had also indicated to break its partnership. It is the same for the production company MRC, which had announced a documentary, already finished, on the rapper, finally canceled it. “We cannot support any content that expands its audience,” argued the agency, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Kanye West banned from Instagram and Twitter
At the beginning of October, the American rapper, who has been in controversy for several weeks (years?), saw his Instagram and Twitter accounts restricted and many of his contents deleted. Meta, Instagram’s parent company, explained via its spokesperson that certain posts had been deleted “for violation of its rules.” Also, with this restriction, Kanye West, alias Ye on social networks, can no longer publish, write comments or send private messages, according to the same source.
This whole new controversy started at Paris Fashion Week, during which Kanye West sported a t-shirt proclaiming “White Lives Matter”, or “White lives matter”, a slogan borrowed from white supremacists, who have hijacked the “Black Lives Matter” from the summer 2020 anti-racism protests in the United States. After these first turmoil, it is on social networks that Kanye West would have caused a new controversy, by attacking the Jews in a publication since deleted.
The organization American Jewish Committee (AJC) accuses Ye, after this publication, of having promoted “hatred of Jews”. “Kanye West should find a way to put forward his point of view without resorting to anti-Semitism,” she denounced, reports AFP. Note that this is not the first time that Kanye West, who suffers from bipolar disorder, has been restricted on social networks: in March 2022, Instagram banned him from publishing for 24 hours, in full divorce with Kim Kardashian . He had attacked comedian Pete Davidson, his ex-wife’s new companion. He had also been accused of racism after messages against South African host Trevor Noah, head of the American talk show The Daily Show.
Kanye West, from controversy to controversy
A few weeks later, Kanye West was banned from the 2022 Grammy Awards. The Recording Academy, which organizes the event each year, justified its decision by Kanye West’s “concerning online conduct”. And the misadventures of the one who is now called Ye do not stop there. End of March, a petition was born on the Internet, to deprogram the 44-year-old artist from the American Coachella festival. Bottom line: Nearly 50,000 signers agreed that “Coachella (along with other brands that continue to work with him) should be ashamed and should stop giving him the opportunity to speak ‘after he has’ harassed, threatened and harmed Kim (Kardashian), Pete (Davidson) and others for over a year.”
And to the organizers of the event to prove them right: Kanye West no longer appears in the Coachella line-up. It will be replaced by The Weeknd and Swedish House Mafia on Sundays April 17 and 24, 2022.