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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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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

The losses have cost Ye billions, he says, but he's unfazed. In an Instagram post Thursday, he said, "I lost 2 billion dollars in one day and I'm still alive." The dropoff means West may have fallen out of the billionaires' club. As of Thursday morning, Forbes estimates his net worth is $400 million; the news outlet previously estimated the value of Ye's Adidas deal to be $1.5 billion.

Meanwhile, Gap announced Tuesday that it had shut down YeezyGap.com and was taking immediate action remove those products from stores, saying, "Antisemitism, racism, and hate in any form are inexcusable and not tolerated in accordance with our values."

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

Forbes had valued the Adidas deal at $1.5 billion. Without it, West's fortune drops to $400 million.

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.

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.