Kanye Summits Billionaire Mountain, Now What?

Forbes drops their World's Billionaires list, profiling various too-wealthy people, every year to the delight of yacht owners and bored people at dentist's offices. While there might be some new additions or some lame anecdote about an asset somebody has, rarely is there anything in the way of surprises or drama. That is, until Kanye West got snubbed.

It seems that despite showing Forbes "an $890 million receipt" in 2019, editors were unable to verify that Ye was indeed a billionaire. Likewise, Yeezy was once again kept off the list for a lack of documentation in 2020. This set him off with a fury that was, as Forbes noted, almost Trumpian in nature. After insulting their profile of him as an almost-billionaire, Kanye came back at Forbes with the amounts of receipts and paperwork usually reserved for taking down Al Capone. In the end, The Louis Vuitton Don proved that he was, in fact, a billionaire (Oh, thank God.). While not quite the $3 billion Kanye claims he's worth, Forbes was able to look at Ye's various assets and debts and came up with a figure of around $1.3 billion.

What's gotten Kanye up to that absurd number is that he's got a fairly diverse portfolio. He's got a storied hip-hop career that'll fuel his wealth for a very long time, and he's also very into fashion -- particularly sneaker design. He's got land and rare cars and other stuff that'll presumably hold value. He's also married into a family that treats selling out as if it were a competitive sport, which will presumably pay serious dividends over time as well.

So this ultimately begs the question: What's next? If Kanye just hung up his Yeezy Boosts right there, we'd understand -- as a point of comparison, Andre 3000 has more or less retired after a career full of near-perfect content, and he feels lots of anxiety trying to top it. It would seem that Kanye has ticked all the life boxes by now: a beautiful family, beautiful houses, storied music career, profitable businesses based on childhood dreams, and billionaire. Is ... is Kanye happy? Like, what else is there to do? The world is his if he wants it, right?

He's been leaning hard into the religious angle for some time now. Kanye even invoked Jesus during his spat with Forbes over whether or not he was a billionaire. Would it surprise anyone if he started a church? Or some kind of theocratic self-sustaining city-state type thing out in Wyoming, where he already owns a shit-ton of land? That's almost the next natural step in the Kanyevolution. People buy into his trash sneaker brand, why wouldn't they buy into a trash lifestyle brand based on his beliefs?

Top Image: Pieter-Jannick Dijkstra/Flickr