New Report Challenges Kanye West’s Staggering Net Worth Valuation
After a week of speculation, the true value of the Kanye West’s fortune is still unclear.
At the top of the week, a Bloomberg report suggested Kanye West had become the richest Black man in America. Largely hinged to a $4.8 billion valuation of his Yeezy brand, the report clocked the rapper’s net worth at a staggering $6.6 billion.
However, a new report from Forbes is challenging the figures cited in Bloomberg’s article and casting doubt on the true value of the rapper’s fortune. According to Forbes, the numbers in the original report were based on West’s own estimations of his wealth and not on the actual assets he owned. In fact, not even the valuation of Yeezy is based on hard numbers. Most of the company’s reported $4.8 billion valuation is wrapped up in a recent partnership with The Gap, which has yet to sell a single garment. The report adjusts the value of Yeezy accordingly, bringing the company’s worth down to $1.5 billion, as opposed to the $3.2 to $4.7 billion reported by Bloomberg earlier in the week.
Additionally, Forbes ran the math on the $1.7 billion in personal assets reported by Bloomberg, finding the total value of West’s art, jewelry, property, livestock, and furniture was closer to $160 million. Assessing the value of his music catalog to be roughly $90 million and his stake in ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s Skims clothing company to be $64 million, the Forbes report determined West’s total net worth was actually about $1.8 billion, which still puts the rapper in a morbidly wealthy sector of entertainers and entrepreneurs. And seeing as how it was only five years ago that Kanye was pleading with Mark Zuckerberg for a loan to pull him out of a $53 million hole, that’s quite the come up by any set of metrics.