Kanye West To Restore His Billionaire Status With Free Handouts?
Fans are organizing GoFundMe pages in an attempt to make Kanye West a billionaire again.
This article is more than 2 years old
Kanye West fans are so concerned about the rapper no longer being considered a billionaire that they’ve set up GoFundMe pages to try to fill his coffers back up. AllHipHop was the first site to report on the crowdfunding, and the story was quickly picked up by NME, Yahoo, and others. The pages are a response to the news that Ye was dropped by adidas and other major sponsors in response to both the antisemitic remarks West made and having models wearing “White Lives Matter” shirts at Paris Fashion Week; knocking his net worth out of billionaire status.
If you’re in the anti-Kanye-West camp and are worried this crowdfunding might actually make a dent, rest easy. AllHipHop reports the pages have since been taken down by the organizers. If the man who put Pete Davidson into therapy wants to level up to billionaire again, he’ll have to rely on something other than the charity of his fans.
If there is a silver lining to this absurd cloud of a story, it’s that the brief crowdfunding attempt could end up helping other people who actually need the assistance. If you search his name on GoFundMe, rather than people asking to aid the rapper, you’ll find people using his name either as a joke or to optimize their own causes on the site’s search engine. Along with a bunch of pages named something like “Make Me A Billionaire Instead of Kanye West”, you’ll find pages like “Help Sri Lanka NOT KANYE WEST,” “Fund my Nursing Education instead of Kanye West,” and “Don’t help Kanye West, get me fishing stuff.”
Ye’s fall from billionaire-dom (biilionaire-isity? billionaireness?) was announced last week, with adidas’s decision to drop the rapper proving to be the biggest contributing factor. At the same time, as Yahoo reports, Kanye West was also dropped by the luxury fashion house Balenciaga, GAP, and JP Morgan Chase. He was also temporarily locked out of both Twitter and Instagram, though he has since returned to both platforms.
Kanye West is hardly a stranger to controversy, but this time it seems like he’s confronting something he hasn’t had to deal with for a while: consequences. Making antisemitic remarks online and in interviews has finally turned otherwise neutral parties against Ye, including other celebrities. Other household names have surfaced to speak out against him, including Kendal Jenner, Justin and Hailey Bieber, and Jaden Smith.
Framing himself as a champion of free speech, Kanye West seems to be taking a cue from both Elon Musk and former President Donald Trump. The rapper is making a move to buy the conservative social media platform Parler, so there will be at least one place on the Internet that will allow him to freely say hateful things.
