In recent days, a flood of companies have severed ties with Kanye West amid a whirlwind of controversy engulfing the 45-year-old rapper and fashion designer.
West stoked the backlash when he wore a White Lives Matter shirt to his Yeezy Season 9 show at Paris Fashion Week in early October.
Then on social media, West threatened to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” before doubling down in a succession of antisemitic statements.
On Tuesday morning, Adidas became the latest company to join the exodus when it announced the end of its partnership with West. It marked what’s widely viewed as the largest financial blow to the rapper, who just days ago declared that the brand “can’t drop me”.
Forbes had estimated West’s net worth at $2bn with most of that wealth tied up in Yeezy, for which he earns an estimated $220m annually as part of his production deal with Adidas.
Prior to Tuesday’s announcement Forbes said that West’s net worth would fall below $1bn should the Adidas contract be torn up, but have now drastically reduced that figure to just $400m.
“Adidas does not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech,” the company said in a statement. “Ye’s recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous, and they violate the company’s values of diversity and inclusion, mutual respect and fairness.”
Amid growing calls for a complete boycott, branding and PR experts told The Independent that West has done irreparable harm to his future earning potential.
Americus Reed, a professor of marketing and branding at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told The Independent that West’s recent outbursts were “chaotic and random, defensive and kneejerk”, and incompatible with his stated desire of building an inclusive global brand.
“The antisemitism is shocking. It’s like where is this coming from? None of it makes any sense, except through the lens of a dysfunctional person coping with problems in their life.”
Should the Adidas partnership be torn up, West’s estimated net wealth would be rendered largely meaningless, Dr Reed said before the brand’s announcement.
“The brand is valued based on its ability to grow into the future. That’s what’s at stake here. It’s absolutely foolish to say I’m worth X, Y and Z so I can do whatever I want.”
German footwear giant Adidas, which produces Yeezy, said in a statement last week that after trying to privately resolve the situation with West, it had placed the partnership “under review.”
Under intense pressure to end its partnership, Adidas did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Juda Engelmayer, president of HeraldPR, a New York-based crisis communications firm, told The Independent it appeared West had no interest in trying to dampen down the controversy.
“With Kanye, I think he’s going to keep on doubling down because that’s his personality and he still has a massive following. He has a serious earning issue going forward, but he’s got so much money I don’t think it’s going to matter,” Mr Engelmayer, a veteran publicist who advised Harvey Weinstein, said.
“I don’t think personally he has a lot to lose other than more personal reputational harm which he doesn’t care about.”
‘Hate speech is never OK’
On 21 October, nearly two weeks after West sent out his initial offensive tweet, Balenciaga announced they had terminated their contract with the artist.
The French fashion house “no longer had any relationship nor any plans for future projects related to this artist,” its parent company Kering told WWD.
Shortly after Balenciaga’s announcement, a spokesperson for Vogue told Page Six that neither the publication nor editor-in-chief Anna Wintour intended to work with the rapper going forward.
“Anna has had enough,” the spokesperson said. “She has made it very clear inside Vogue that Kanye is no longer part of the inner circle.”
The exodus wasn’t finished there. Film and television firm MRC Entertainment announced Monday they would no longer distribute a recently completed documentary about West, who legally changed his name to Ye in 2021.
“The silence from leaders and corporations when it comes to Kanye or antisemitism in general is dismaying but not surprising,” MRC said in a pointed statement.
CAA, the Hollywood talent agency, also said on Monday they would no longer represent the rapper, according to a Los Angeles Times report.
JP Morgan Chase also cut ties with West amid the fallout. His Los Angeles stadium show was cancelled. He was blocked from Instagram and Twitter. His own lawyer dropped him.
Through it all, West has appeared unfazed. His confidence came through strong in a 16 October episode of Drinking Champs, which was later removed by YouTube.
“The thing about me and Adidas is, I could literally say antisemitic sh*t and they can’t drop me,” the rapper is seen saying in the video. “I could say antisemitic things and Adidas can’t drop me. Now what?”
West’s other fashion collaboration on his Yeezy clothing and footwear line was with Gap, which came to an end in September, just before his latest controversy blew up.
West said he had cut ties with Gap after accusing the clothing brand of breach of contract.
The company appeared unbothered. In an internal email obtained by the New York Post, Gap Brands President & CEO Mark Breitbard said the partnership was being wound down as their vision no longer aligned with West’s.
Some have blamed his racist behaviour on his increasingly acrimonious divorce from Kim Kardashian.
The couple signed a pre-nuptial agreement prior to their 2014 wedding, Radar reported during court proceedings earlier this year.
It revealed that their fortunes largely remained in their own names and Forbes puts the cost of the split at about $2.5m, largely on legal fees to divide their $70m property portfolio and other assets.
Kardashian broke her silence about her ex-husband’s behaviour on Monday, tweeting: “Hate speech is never OK or excusable. I stand together with the Jewish community and call on the terrible violence and hateful rhetoric towards them to come to an immediate end.”
West has also previously teamed up with global brands in music and technology including Apple and Def Jam.
‘What’s the endgame here?’
West’s provocative statements may help him to dominate the news cycle for a while, but by alienating a large part of his fanbase he could soon find himself “untouchable”, Dr Reed says.
“He’s saying ‘I am an artist, and yet I have an ego that’s associated with wanting to be right, and if anyone pushes back I triple down and try to protect my own ego’.
“You have to by definition be narrowing your ability to be an icon and a global brand, because a global brand speaks to everybody, and it speaks to dimensions that don’t create connection with narrow political ideologies.”
Dr Reed said it appeared West was trying to “plant a flag in this smaller group”.
“If the goal is to grow and grow and be a global shoe salesman and artistic genius, in my opinion that’s a huge mistake because by definition you’re kicking people out of the tent and pushing people out of the way.
“I rack my brain as to what is the logic. What’s the endgame here?”
West could become commercially attractive to “fringe brands with a narrow edginess to them”, Dr Reed says.
“But I don’t think his goal is to be that narrow figure, I think his goal is to be iconic and global. And what he’s doing is taking him in the opposite direction.”
“I think what Kanye really loves is relevance, more so than money. You can go make more money, but once you become culturally irrelevant or culturally toxic, that’s a much bigger problem,” Dr Reed tells The Independent.
“When you’re a businessperson and you’re building a global brand you need to be measured, purposeful, disciplined, sensitive to feedback and self-aware to know when you’re spiralling out of control and about to cause yourself immense damage.”
West may be ‘too big to fail’
Speaking to The Independent prior to the severing of ties on Tuesday, Mr Engelmayer, of HeraldPR, said Adidas would be conducting a careful cost-benefit analysis before making a final decision whether to drop West.
“The risk Adidas has is if Kanye has a big enough support base and he drops them, then people say that the white Jewish overlords of Adidas made them cancel Kanye. That could bring a lot of negative social media attention on Adidas.”
If he was advising West, Mr Engelmayer said he would tell him to lay low and stop talking.
“Right now everything he says will just be seen as gratuitous. If he was genuinely interested in fixing things, he should get himself out of the media.
“Don’t tweet, don’t Parler, let the news cycle rest, write a new song, and don’t mention politics.
“If he came back in six weeks and spoke about his kids and his family it would slowly disappear. But he’s not that kind of person, he’s getting the attention he’s craving.”
West’s promoting of racist propaganda had seen him been embraced by “strange bedfellows”, Mr Engelmayer noted, including a group of white supremacists who hung banners from a Los Angeles freeway at the weekend.
What makes his recent actions even more perplexing is that his right hand man in building Yeezy into a global force was Udi Avshalom, an Israeli-born footwear and branding expert who was the firm’s chief operating officer for five years.
According to his Linkedin profile, Mr Avshalom remains an advisor to West “in various strategic roles”.
Mr Engelmayer said he thought West’s purchase of Parler could work out to be a clever strategic move as it would help to keep him in the public eye.
“What Kanye is doing is he’s telling the world he’s going to have a platform regardless. It’s a talking point, it keeps him in the news again, it generates headlines for him, not just in the gossip publications but also the business journals and the financial journals who are talking about what Parler is worth. It doubles his headlines and that’s what he’s going for.”
He says the only way West will start to lose relevance is if the media starts ignoring him.
“We are in this age of cancellation, but there is something to the fact of being too big to fail. Someone who has so much money, and is so powerful, there’s not a lot that Kanye can do to lose the following he does have.
“There are still millions of people out there, throngs of supporters who love him. When you have so much money, so much access, it’s hard to become irrelevant.
“It’s just like Donald Trump, for all the left wanted to dismiss him and knock him down, they gave him so much coverage.”
