Kanye West is officially a billionaire. Although the rapper has been acting like a billionaire since his debut album, ‘The College Dropout’, back in 2016 he went through a very public admission of being in $50m worth of debt, even gong so far as drawing up mind map of business ideas that he pitched to Mark Zuckerberg via Twitter. (We miss those classic Kanye Twitter days).
It was Forbes that first reported him to be worth $1.3 billion, which received a rapid response from Kanye himself to state that his actual net worth is $3.3 billion and that the team over at Forbes had miscalculated.
When a strained relationship with Nike came to a head back in 2012 and Kanye left his dream of creating his own trainer brand it looked like his attempts at reaching the big ‘B’ would never come to fruition. However, just a year later, in 2013, Kanye signed with German brand adidas and in 2015, the Yeezy Boost started its journey that got it where it is today.
It’s well known that Kanye has his fingers in many pies; since his dawning in the world of music he has expanded his portfolio as widely as possible with talks of him even getting involved in architecture and starting his own church with regular Sunday services.
Out of that $50m hole, Kanye has quickly scrambled out and now sits atop a pile of wealth that few artists have achieved. The Billionaire status was not achieved by record sales, however. Instead, it was the 11% royalties he receives from his Yeezy line with adidas that in 2019 pocketed him a cool $1.3 billion. A percentage that couldn’t be achieved with Nike and what ultimately led to his departure.
That royalty check goes a long way in explaining why we’re seeing Yeezy colourways dropping left right and centre. Kanye West recently spoke of his dream of “Yeezys for all” which was initially brushed off as poor marketing for a trainer that drops in limited numbers for over $200, but with adidas, that dream is more likely to happen as we are also seeing plenty more restocks of some of the favourite colourways, including the “Sesame”, “Cream/Triple White” and “Zebra”.
Fans of the Yeezy boost 350 “Cream” can find buy and sell options right now at Laced’s online trainers portal.