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Finally we're seeing the extent of the damage of the Kanye controversy
In the span of a month, Kanye West has destroyed his empire
yup..YeezyGap.com redirects to gap.com
What I don't understand is, how is his wealth being calculated here? Wouldn't Kanye's wealth be a roughly monotonically increasing function , that being his income from his endorsement deals? Losing said deals would not mean he has to forfeit accumulated wealth, just that he stops making any new wealth? So either he was never worth $2 billion or this decline is somehow based on some extrapolation?
From the Forbes link, it looks like an extrapolation : https://www.forbes.com/profile/kanye-west/?sh=515edd0c56f1
That seems misleading to say someone is worth something but it's not actually realized
To add, it shows how the mere accusation of racism or antisemitism is the left's superpower. It forces the accused to go on the defense and presumes some guilt. Any nuance or misunderstanding on the accused goes out the window. You can destroy someone's reputation this way even if it was a mistake. As popular as anti-woke sentiment is on twitter ,like Rogan and Musk, it does not matter if the people who hold the levers of power are still, by in large, woke , and and you have to literally be a self-made millionaire to survive said accusations without being completely destroyed career-wise or reputationally. Someone can argue "what Kanye said was really egregious" but people have been cancelled, banned for less and it does not change the automatic presumption of guilt.
I'm surprised this is confusing to you, you can more or less convert between cashflows and capital. There is some accountant voodoo that makes it more complicated than just taking the rate of payments and dividing it by whatever reasonably expected capital interest rate of return to find the capital value of that cash flow but it's not that far off.
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Mark Zuckerberg's wealth is determined by the fraction of Facebook that he owns times (let's say) the net present value of Facebook's anticipated future profits, plus his personal savings. When our expectations of Facebook's future profits change, then Zuckerberg's wealth changes.
Likewise, Kanye runs a business. It isn't as well defined as Facebook, because it isn't (as far as I know) a formal corporation with formal shareholders, and it certainly isn't publicly traded in a way that establishes a market valuation, but nonetheless Kanye owns it, and when our expectations of its future profit changes, then Kanye's wealth changes.
This isn't an insight, it's just displacing the insight by one more layer of abstraction. "The stock is worth what we expect other people to think it's worth." Great, and how do they decide? That's how Bitcoin is valued, and Beanie Babies (the toys, not the company), but valuations of equities in companies like Amazon are presumed to bottom out in a net present value analysis of expected future earnings.
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Think it’s fair to say he’s lost that amount of wealth. This is how the stock market figures a price. And all wealth is in volatile instruments. I don’t think it matters if it’s an addidas contract or the cash flows of apply stock.
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I don’t think of a superpower as requiring the target to hang himself.
Kanye made himself pretty clear in a public forum. Where’s the nuance and misunderstanding?
What is considered racist is always changing. Something as innocuous as making an ok-sign hand gesture has now been deemed racist. https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/okay-hand-gesture. Also, just being accused of racism can be as bad as being racist.
On the margins. Kanye West's behavior would have drawn censure 20-30 years ago (though it would have been harder to expose himself in such a way without modern social media), so it's not like he's the victim of semantic creep here. Nor are we talking about a careless choice of words in an isolated incident. Even in time when anti-semitism itself was more tolerated, you were generally expected to be somewhat genteel about it. Going on an unhinged rant in public about the Jews would've gotten many of your fellow anti-semites edging away from you awkwardly for fear of association.
I'm not entirely sure what this is supposed to mean, but I think what you're saying is that the social consequences of having people falsely believe that you are racist can be as bad as the social consequences of having people correctly believe that you are racist. Which seems trivially true, and applies to any accusation of some negative trait (e.g. being believed to be a liar). The real question is how likely is a spurious accusation to be taken seriously, and my comment there is: even in communities that think racism is a serious issue, "that's racist" is mostly a punchline. People of relatively ordinary means who live in communities that are hypersensitive to racism do sometimes get in a lot of trouble for innocuous statements, but that doesn't lead us to the conclusion that accusing someone of racism is a superweapon unless we're willing to accept an incredibly high miss rate on our superlaser.
Why is The Motte here and not on reddit? Accusations of racism or other forms of badthink carry a lot of weight even if unfounded. All it takes is a handful of people. For someone like Dave Chappelle, who has made controversial remarks , it's understood he has some artistic freedom and is a major draw, thus he has more leeway. But it costs Facebook or Reddit $0 to delete/suspend an account accused of being racist. It's not like Netflix can find another Chappelle or Spotify can find another Rogan as easily as Facebook or Reddit can sign up another annon user.
The thread above this one has multiple explicit white nationalists arguing about the exact borders of their ideology. If the Motte was accused of harboring racists, that's because it was - it has made a deliberate policy of tolerating positions and beliefs that Reddit doesn't want to play host to or are otherwise outside the Overton Window. You can quibble over what exactly qualifies as 'racist' (or transphobic/homophobic/otherwise bigoted) but the content that was getting the Motte unwanted scrutiny from the admins was a) generally not marginal b) generally not imaginary.
I want to be clear: I am not claiming that nobody has ever been subject to bullshit accusations. But people like West and places like the Motte make a really bad case for such accusations being rhetorical superweapons.
You certainly can get in trouble over imagined transgressions, but it's extremely unlikely that any given accusation of racism is going to manifest into actual consequences, especially if there's nothing actually there (for that matter, even if there is). Conservatives get accused of being racist constantly for their views on basically everything (criminal justice, voting rights, immigration, welfare, education, housing policy, transit policy...) and so far it doesn't seem to be making much of a dent.
Losing access to private services can still make your life miserable. I like having a reddit account. i like having access to Gmail. Losing my contacts would be a major inconvenience.
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Yes, your thesis is clear. How does Kanye back it up?
He didn’t get tripped up on the euphemism treadmill. There was no ok-sign invoked. Getting on the “cancellation is soooo arbitrary” soapbox seems like a stretch.
David Shor was fired for merely tweeting a study that went against the narrative of BLM . How are you supposed to anticipate something like that.
I'm going to echo @netstack and say that again, this doesn't really address the point. I certainly agree with you that things like David Shor's firing, or the "OK" gesture being labeled white supremacist, are insane overreaches and well worthy of criticism. They are horrible, and the people advancing those ideas should be laughed out of the marketplace of ideas.
However, like @netstack I don't think that they are particularly relevant to the object-level point about Kanye. For his entire life (he was born in 1977), it would have been considered bad to go on a rant about the Jews. This is not some new and capricious facet of cancel culture, this is the crossing of a very well established boundary in polite discourse, one which Kanye should have known full well about.
You are certainly welcome to disagree with that, but in that case an argument of "these other outrageous things happened too" is not going to be persuasive as it isn't really relevant. A more relevant (and thus persuasive) argument would be something like "here is a public figure who recently angrily ranted about Jews and got away without consequences". Better still would be multiple such examples, because they would show more clearly that the examples were due to different norms and not because a single person somehow flew under the radar. But bringing up cancel culture overreaches that are completely unrelated to anti-Semitism isn't going to really cut it, at least not for me personally.
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I think Kanye thought he was saying what everyone is thinking and so he might lose a little money, but he would start a conversation we need to have and so would eventually be forgiven.
Because to be clear, he is saying what a lot of people - especially poor black people (and absolutely not just NOI or Farrakhan followers, that is just an excuse to pretend there's nothing to see here) - think. And we absolutely do need to have a conversation about it if we ever want to get out of the snare of racial politics, the situation is fucked.
Nobody wants to be tarred as a nazi so everyone is vociferous in their support for Jewish people in public, but so many people are seething with mistrust towards them in private, and not being able to say anything just increases their resentment!
Why wouldn't you think they control society when you can talk shit about anyone you like - even the president - but must never badmouth the Jews? Or at least never imply they hold more positions of power than seems natural given their numbers even though they indisputably do?
It shouldn't be necessary to say this, but I know it is - this does not mean I think they should be discriminated against. But I think after 75 years it's time to retire the holocaust card. It is the only thing that really separates them from the Irish, or Italians, or Armenians, or any other "white" ethnicity. They should not be treated as minorities in need of protection any longer. I don't actually think that would change their prospects much, but it would ease a lot of resentment.
Irish & Armenians I'll give you -- like the Jews, the Irish and the Armenians were victims of genocidal policies; it's at least a topic for debate what should happen with the surviving remnant of an incomplete atrocity.
But is there some genocide of Italians which I've forgotten? In particular, Rome conquered Israel, Ireland and Armenia in ancient times; it's an odd hodge-podge to stick them up as a neutral example of overcoming bias alongside the other two!
I don't quite understand what (other than the passage of time?) invalidates a "holocaust card", but I believe that the targeted mass murder of ancestors for shared attributes is relevant to discussions about identity and minority status, even in countries which didn't engage in that murder, and that 75 years isn't necessarily enough time to declare the topic closed. Certainly I believe 2000 years is; maybe 300 years is, maybe 300 years isn't; no opinion.
I think you're saying that in a perfectly egalitarian world, being Jewish would be no more relevant to politics than being seventh generation Italian-American. Often that's actually true today, so take heart!
Maybe you see the holocaust brought up in arguments where it feels out of context? I personally hear it come up when discussing "bright" ideas such as counting jews (, gentiles, asians, blacks, ...) in jobs or other positions of power, such as accusing groups of malice based on their immutable characteristics, such as other political experiments that point at the gulag.
I think that there is no Holocaust card; there are only political debates which reward demonstrations of trauma, and conversations which somehow keep making the trauma relevant (these are often but not necessarily the same thing).
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Oh yeah I definitely agree. Kanye is clearly not well mentally, and I don't think it's right to castigate him in light of that. As you indicated, one can show compassion for a sick man while also not pretending what he did was ok.
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Agree...I think he knew. Maybe Kanye thought he would be able to get away with it owing to his fame and popularity, or be able to explain that he meant Jews in an abstract sense , but evidently not .
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Does it show that, if what Kanye did was really egregious? It took several weeks of continuous bad behavior for his large business partners to drop him, not a mere accusation, or presumption of guilt. He doubled down, and then doubled down again. He even gloated that "[he] can say anti-sematic shit and Adidas can't drop [him]" before Adidas actually dropped him.
This method of argument reminds me of certain types of misleading posts on reddit. Where, even after they get debunked, the echo-chamber will say "yeah, this example may be misleading/fake, but it still highlights the obvious problem that exists today!"
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Imagine if we took West's business dealings, put them all in a company he owned 100% of, and then asked how much is the company worth? Obviously it has a value, while those contracts are dependent on West's personal brand, they have expected future cash flows that can theoretically be sold. If West had wanted to, he could have realized a portion of those earnings in advance by selling the right to those future cash flows, at a discount obviously, likely with a contract forbidding him from saying precisely this sort of shit about Jews. He never literally had two billion dollars, but he had tangible assets that would have almost certainly yielded more than two billion dollars over their lifetimes in a hypothetical world where he had not blown them up, which someone might theoretically have paid around 2 billion dollars for.
Yes, and his personal brand and reputation would certainly allow him to negotiate future deals in an advantageous fashion.
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One thing I've been thinking about: how will this affect Kanye's acclaim as a music artist? It's already a bit hard to remember all this, but according to acclaimedmusic.net - a website that collects "greatest albums" style lists from various sources and compares them using an algorithm to create a comprehensive greatest artist/album list purportedly showing the critical consensus - Kanye is actually the thirteenth-most appraised popular music artist (or band) of all time, almost as appraised as Elvis, more appraised than, for instance, The Who, Nirvana or U2. Of course one might quibble with this based on their personal preferences, but I for one wouldn't quibble with it too much, clearly Kanye is one of the last artists that has managed to combine formidable album sales in tens of millions with equally formidable critical appraisal, and even though I'm not much into rap music myself, Kanye is one of the few rappers to make albums I've genuinely liked.
...I mean, obviously it will affect it negatively! But how much? Will he be completely struck from greatest artist lists? Will he just get a downgrade - the Pitchforks and Rolling Stones of the world still including My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in their top 100 albums of the 2010s lists, but around the 70s-80s and with a profuse apology about the problematic latter status of the artist? Will it all just be eventually excused as a phase, an (admittedly long) stretch of mental illness? Maybe everyone will just stop caring about music anyway? It sometimes feels that way, though of course that might just mean I'm getting old and finding more to life than obsessing about pop music.
Kanye is one of the most significant artists of the first few decades of the 21st century, at least in the West. There's a lot of people in their 30s now who grew up with his music, at least if they were into hiphop. He was together with Drake arguably the most influential artist in rap after the Jay-Z/Eminem/Dre/Nas era.
What sets him apart from the others is that he made tons of money outside of music, far in excess of what is typical. The only other major successful rap artist I can think of who made much more money in non-music ventures would be Dr.Dre with his "beats" peripherals. But Kanye is certainly going to rank higher than Dre when the history of hip-hop is written (if we limit ourselves to music).
That's why this attack is so amazing. He had everything to lose and he didn't blink twice doing it.
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Rolling Stones being third makes me wonder if they would have been first or even second, had they not bedded underage groupies or if this fact isn't taken into account when their music is rated.
But perhaps such indiscretions are expected of '60s and '70s rock stars and aren't held against them.
The only reason Rolling Stones is third instead of thirtieth is their bad boy reputation at the time (as a sort of contratian answer to Beatles). Neither their musical output nor their influence warrants a place anywhere close to top ten.
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These lists change as generations of critics do, and today’s critics would surely ding them for this, but their reputations were made prior to this stuff being a significant concern.
Bowie’s fascist-sympathizing period has not really dinged his rep. He was on heroin, then, don’t you know, and besides, he explored gender fluidity and took MTV to task for not featuring black artists.
Wasn't Bowie's deep dark secret that he was actually straight?
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I'm assuming thats probably in large part because it doesn't really get mentioned much.
Yeah, that's news to me.
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I'd just put it down to "Of course The Beatles are going to be the first and of course Dylan is going to be the second".
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Welcome to literally every "richest man on Earth" statistic ever.
A small Twitch streamer I follow has a reported net worth of like a million and a half. Meanwhile, he gets paid peanuts from YouTube and he's made it clear that his financials are a bit shaky as of recent.
How much of that is him putting down a mortgage on a house he can barely afford and just overspending in his day to day life? I doubt the figure was just the present discounted value on his current Twitch and YouTube income.
Well, he actually lives in a beach house owned by his parents (in exchange for keeping it clean), and I think it's mostly just "YouTube performance has been disappointing" (Twitch income isn't too bad outside of ads, though).
Wait? Who is reporting small Twitch streamers net worth? There is a big difference between a site like Forbes that does it's due diligence and some random rag that posts whatever.
And; anyway, from what I know even modest YouTubers who post daily videos with views in the 5 figure range get good money even without the Twitch bucks.
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sorta. Stock implies legal ownership. A contact is something that can be voided at any time although usually there is a termination clause.
If SpaceX lost a major lucrative contract with the Defense Department, then Elon Musk's wealth would change.
Yes, and then his wealth would also change.
I am often surprised by our apparent inferential distance in discussions with you. I don't know what to make of it.
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Headline: "Jeff Bezos lost a billion dollars yesterday"
Actual fact: Amazon stock price dipped a bit.
Later when it goes back up they'll make a new headline of "Jeff Bezos made a billion dollars, yet owes nothing in taxes, Warren proposes wealth tax".
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This is how wealth is always reported. And yes, it is misleading--Jeff Bezos is "worth" over $100 billion on paper, but if he were to try to cash that out all at once, there's no way he'd get $100 billion out of it. The price of his stock would plummet faster than he could sell it, never mind finding $100 billion in cash buyers. It seems safe to assume that Amazon stock is somewhat more robust in valuation than Kanye's endorsement deal with Adidas, but the basic principle is the same.
In fact much of Bezos' worth is, in the terminology of the IRS, "unrealized gains." Capital gains are "realized" (and thus, taxed) only during certain events, usually sales. If I sign a contract for $1 billion to endorse Adidas shoes for the next ten years, I can walk into a bank with that contract and take out loans against that deal. If Adidas backs out, well, I'm gonna default on those loans, so the bank might be hesitant to loan too much money on that promise, but they would definitely loan some. We almost always evaluate wealthy people's worth based not only on cash-on-hand, but on a combination of liabilities and assets. A promise from Adidas to pay $1 billion over ten years is an asset, even if it is not as stable an asset as a mansion or a yacht.
This point is often stated and usually overstated. The only ways that a sale from Jeff Bezos would damage Amazon's valuation are if it persuades the market that either (1) Jeff Bezos has private information that causes him to be pessimistic about Amazon's future and that he is selling for that reason, or (2) Jeff Bezos's ongoing personal efforts are necessary to Amazon's success, and his sale indicates an intent to reduce the level of effort.
It's odd to speak of share of Amazon stock as having any meaningful inelasticity in the demand curve over the course of even a few weeks, such that dumping shares would overwhelm the population of willing buyers and cause the price to drop purely as a matter of supply and demand. It's like asking how many $100 bills you'd have to sell for $50 each before the value of the $100 bill dropped below $50. The demand schedule for $100 bills is effectively infinite at $99, and effectively zero at $101. Likewise Amazon's shares around the expected net present value of its future earnings; the analogy isn't perfect (the value of a share of Amazon isn't as objective as the value of a $100 bill, and it would take probably a few days after a shock for more smart money to do the analysis and come to a view of its value), but it's closer than an analogy to supply and demand curves with nice straight lines.
Apologies for chasing a nitpicky point; it's a pet peeve of mine.
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Not the same thing. The Adidas's deal was effectively an IOU that could be cancelled at Adidas's discretion. Amazon stock is an asset that legally belongs to Bezos that can be sold on an exchange.
Not quite so. He could sell it to a private investor, like a bank , without the shares having to hit the exchange. This is how Elon negotiated the Twitter buyout. Also, Amazon trades considerable volume daily , so selling even on the market would not be too hard. Third, Bezos could also hedge the position with options.
Well, yes, shares of Amazon are not the same thing as a partnership contract. But shares of Amazon are also not the same thing as a house, or a piece of art, or a bitcoin. One thing they all have in common, though, is that they (can) get counted as assets when calculating wealth. Another thing they have in common is that their value can disappear suddenly and without much warning under the right circumstances. Those circumstances differ by the kind of wealth under consideration, but in general that's not the kind of thing people bother to factor in when calculating present wealth.
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And this is why wealthy people who live off their investments don't pay taxes. Let's say I own $100 million in Berkshire Hathaway stock and I want to spend $4 million per year. I could sell $4 million in stock and then pay capital gain taxes. Or, I could borrow $4 million against the stock and pay no taxes. The interest on the margin debt is even deductible.
Note: This worked a lot better when margin interest was as low as 1%.
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Where exactly is the boundary on assets and liabilities that go into net worth? For instance, the sum total of all my future labor is valuable, and events in the present can increase or decrease that value, but it generally wouldn't be included in my net worth (except under the utilitarian accounting that some like to use in these circles). Is the distinction based solely on risk? Are valid sources of personal wealth just enumerated in a list somewhere? Is there some other metric that everyone uses?
Wherever you want! Or, more realistically, wherever the government agency you're dealing with wants to put it.
When you apply for a home loan in the United States, it is common for lenders to ask for proof of salary in the form of paystubs or a contract. I doubt they think of it in terms of "net worth" (but I don't know, maybe they do?) but that is one way the anticipated sum of your future labor is sometimes used to gauge your worth. Actually there are some theorists out there doing research two steps removed from the current system of income tax. First remove: they think we should tax wealth additionally or instead. Second remove: they think that one form of wealth is natural talent, so we should find a way to tax e.g. naturally smart people to deprive them of the unequal advantage they have over others. While I am skeptical the idea will ever get traction outside the ivory towers of academia, there are definitely people out there who want to think about your net worth in terms of all your assets, including your anticipated labor and inherent talents.
There are many such lists. Here is one oriented toward business. Here is a list that explicitly excludes labor. Medicaid has its own list. Different states have different approaches to, e.g., the treatment of a university degree as a dividable asset in divorce proceedings.
There is, in other words, no Platonic ideal of "asset" which gets applied in every case, or even most cases. Whether you count someone's assets in a liberal or constrained way usually depends on what it is you're trying to accomplish. For example, I once heard of a case where the IRS valued a certain coin collection at "market value" for the purpose of measuring an estate's worth, but then seizing the coins and crediting only their face value against the defendant's tax bill. There is no such thing as objective valuation. There is only majority hashpower in the blockchain of life.
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Generally accepted accounting principals or GAAP, lays out the methods that businesses use.
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Adidas contracts are probably much more stable than yacht values in typical, non-"shutting it down with much oy vey-ing" circumstances. The prices those things are bought and sold at make tumblr look like a sensible investment.
But that's admittedly not much of a counterpoint to the "so isn't wealth just whatever the bankers say it is?" position.
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