Kanye West is a busy man. While best known for his music, his clothing line Yeezy has also been quite lucrative as of late and recently announced a partnership with the Gap. There’s also the matter of him possibly running for president. All of this has made West quite wealthy — earlier this year, Forbes confirmed that West is indeed a billionaire. One good thing about being a billionaire is, well, having an absurd amount of money. One bad thing about it? A much higher level of scrutiny applied to your business decisions.
CBS News is reporting that Yeezy was one of a number of businesses that received a sizable Small Business Administration loan as part of the Treasury Department’s pandemic relief efforts. How sizable, you might ask? Pretty sizable:
Kanye West’s clothing and sneaker brand Yeezy received a loan from the federal government’s pandemic rescue fund worth between $2 million and $5 million, helping it save 106 jobs, according to data released by the U.S. Treasury Department on Monday.
This is not to say that the pandemic didn’t put jobs at risk, but the optics of a business owned by a billionaire seeking relief funds are — to put it mildly — not great.
Doesn’t this seem off?
In 2018 @kanyewest said Yeezy was hiring 160 people & would hit a billion dollars'Now- we see on his #PPP, he was “saving” 160 “at risk” jobs
May be worth investigating payroll inflation https://t.co/PAHVEaFwx6
— Stephanie Ruhle (@SRuhle) July 6, 2020
As MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle noted on Twitter, some of the wording West has used in the past may raise further questions about how the money was used. West’s proximity to the Trump administration in recent years has also sparked questions from political observers. Yeezy’s Gap partnership may have solidified the company’s future, but this news guarantees at least some short-term frustration.
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