Forbes Magazine, that world-famous roll call of rich people, whose most popular activity is checking other people’s pockets and announcing what they find there, the magazine most known for counting other people’s money, the foremost global minders of other people’s business, recently revealed that Kanye West is now a billionaire. Kanye West may be great at making entertaining little ditties for the kids to dance to, but the college dropout would not have graduated in accounting, because when Forbes declared him a billionaire, he responded by issuing what he felt was an elaboration: he informed them that it is three billion actually. See? The man doesn’t understand that even if you are worth 3.3 billion dollars, the term is still “billionaire”. They don’t call you three point three billionaires. Kanye doesn’t know English. Oh, wait. This just in. My Financial Research Intern has just informed me that I am drunk again. What happened was that Forbes, in calling him a billionaire, reported his net worth at 1.3billion and his rebuttal was to correct the figure, not the terminology. Oh, sorry. My bad. In my defense, I dropped out of college, too, so I don’t know how to get my facts straight. Kanye is, as my intern, Angel, has confirmed, a rap billionaire, worth between 1.3 and 3.3billion dollars. This could still use some explanation because we all know that in this day and age, rappers don’t earn millions from rapping. And, since, unlike his ex-BFF Jay-Z, Kanye has never had a successful drug dealing hustle to build on, we have to wonder, where did he get all that money? (By the way, I’m not the one who said Jay-Z was a drug lord. I just heard. From him. On every song he has ever dropped since 1996.) To understand how Kanye West manages to make so much money from music in this age of downloads and piracy and streams where each play is worth less than a mosquito’s toenail, I refer you to what is known as Industry Rule number 4080: record companies are shady. The way the music business is set up, the artiste could sell thousands of units and still be broke. The record label owner is the one who actually makes money. That is why every rapper sets up a label. That is how the game goes. Dre is rich because of Eminem. Eminem is rich because of 50 Cent. 50 Cent is rich because of G-unit. And no one in G-unit is rich. Kanye’s ownership of the GOOD music catalog enables him to be further enriched every time Common, Pusha T, John Legend and … who else is on the GOOD Music label? Anyone Lil? Anyone Young? Whoever it is: whenever any of them sings, they make money for Kanye. Another source of his billion, or billion point three, or billions, is selling shoes. One day Kanye West was driving along a highway between cities when he ran over a jackal. Now, when you are an artiste of Kanye’s calibre, inspiration strikes from all sources. Kanye looked at that dead, flattened carcass, covered in tire marks, holes and flies and instantly imagined what it would look like on the edge of a customer’s leg. “I am going to make shoes like this!” he thought. Thus was born the Yeezy sneaker line, which eschewed the conventional way of selling footwear (i.e. make several nice shoes and sell many of them that you become rich) for a different route -- make some hideous, messed-up dead-jackal-looking shoes and set the price so high that even if you sell relatively few to the sort of people who will buy any ugliness as long as it is being hawked by a celebrity, you still take home a lot of money. Don’t forget that there are still people bidding on EBay for Britney Spears’ used chewing gum. This process is known as price differentiation, luxury markup and ripping off gullible trend-junkies, according to my business research intern, Collette. West also has a lot of money coming in from land and real estate. He owns several properties in Los Angeles, which is lucrative, but he also owns land in Wyoming. What is Wyoming? There are no movies set there, and no rappers claiming to rep Wyoming so we know nothing about it. It’s probably just a barren wasteland strewn with dead jackal and coyote roadkill. That’s probably where he gets the raw materials for the Yeezy’s.
