Kanye West says that the Internal Revenue Service has frozen four of his bank accounts because he owes $50 million in taxes to the federal government.
West told right-leaning podcaster Tim Pool on Monday that he had changed his legal name to Ye.
Kanye West left the interview on Pool’s “Timcast IRL” podcast after the host pushed back on the rapper’s latest anti-Semitic comments about how Jews supposedly control the media.
Nicholas Fuentes, a white nationalist, and Milo Yiannopoulos, a controversial media figure who now works for Ye’s presidential campaign, were also on the podcast with the rapper.
Fuentes and Ye had dinner with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach last week, which made a lot of people angry.
Ye talked about his money before the argumentative part of the interview.
The “Gold Digger” singer, who was on the podcast to promote his run for president in 2024, told Pool that his “finance people” told him he would “have to pay a lot of taxes.”
I’m talking about literally finding out that they were trying to put me in prison this morning,
Ye said.
But I found out — okay, so they froze, they put a $75 million hold on four of my accounts.
“And then they said, ‘You owe a lot of taxes.’ Took me like six hours to find out how much ‘a lot’ was,
Ye said.
Well, it was around $50 million.
A source has asked the IRS for a comment.
Ye said in the interview that he was “clearly not the most financially savvy person on the planet.” He said that he asked, “different CFOs” who worked for his companies if he was trying to avoid paying taxes.
So now I’m having — I get to actually learn how to run a company. I get to learn how to, you know, to count, really,
Ye said.
It’s like I didn’t even know where to put the money.
In the past two months, Ye has gotten a lot of bad press, which has cost him lucrative partnerships with top brands like Adidas and Gap.
Adidas, a sportswear company based in Germany, said last week that it would start an internal investigation into claims that Ye, who worked with Adidas to sell his Yeezy brand of clothes and shoes, showed pornographic material to employees.
Adidas cut ties with rapper Ye last month after he said some offensive things about Jews on social media. Gap, another company that worked with Ye and sold his clothing line, also cut ties with him after he said things that could cause trouble.
In 2013, Ye and Adidas worked together to sell his Yeezy shoe line.
People said that the company should have divorced the former billionaire sooner. Many people thought that this was because shoes with the Ye brand made Adidas almost $2 billion in sales last year, according to Morgan Stanley.
Forbes says that Ye’s net worth has dropped from an estimated $2 billion to a much smaller $400 million because of broken partnerships.
