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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.
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.
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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