THE DIVORCE BETWEEN KIM KARDASHIAN AND KANYE WEST IN FIGURES: ALMOST 2,000 MILLION EUROS AT STAKE
When they married, the rapper had trouble managing his small fortune while Kim was a rising star. Today, the two are practically billionaires, something that no prenuptial agreement could have foreseen.
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have been separated for a long time, but it seems that no attempt at reconciliation can save their marriage. The couple, with four children in common (North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm, born between 2013 and 2019), separated months ago, after the electoral adventure of the rapper, who carried out an extravagant presidential campaign without consulting the family. And that would have been the final straw for Kim, unable to continue dealing with her husband's mental health issues. Now, while he lives in Wyoming with her best friend - according to rumors, more than friend - as her neighbor and she takes refuge in the Kardashian clan in California, it seems that the divorce is a matter of weeks. A lawsuit that would be brought by celebrity divorce lawyer Laura Wasser, according to Page Six and US Weekly. And in which, apart from the custody of her four children that Kim would be willing to fight, the fortunes of both also enter. Fortunes that when they married in 2014 were around 100 million euros and today they touch or exceed 2,000 million euros.
Kim's millions
Kim met with her sisters and her family this week to celebrate together the last day of filming for the final season of Keeping up with the Kardashians, the reality show that, over 20 seasons, catapulted the clan to fame. . There have been 20 seasons in which Kim has earned half a million dollars per episode. A growing fortune that, however, is only a small part of her heritage. Kim made his fortune with a mobile video game (Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, by Glu Games), introduced a month after her wedding to Kanye in 2014, which reached 72 million downloads ... and revenues that together exceeded 200 million euros, of which Kim kept at least 56 million euros in four years. That added to the rest of her income catapulted the television star to the top of famous millionaires: Kim began to earn about 50 million clean euros a year since 2014, which soon rose to 65-70 million euros a year.
Before that, her fortune was already valued at about 85 million euros. To take an example of her, her previous wedding in 2011 with basketball player Kris Humphries, which lasted 72 days, brought her –among exclusives, sponsorships and commercial agreements– another 15 million euros. The Kardashian also enriched herself with her Instagram, charging millionaire figures for each sponsorship - between 250,000 and 410,000 euros per post - and with her talent as a businesswoman. Only in financing rounds for her different companies between 2013 and today, Kim has entered about 80 million euros to start her business. The most lucrative of them is KKW Beauty, a cosmetics firm with more realistic valuations than that of her stepsister Kylie Jenner: between 800 and 900 million euros. The firm earns about 100 million euros a year, and Kim sold 20% of its stake a few months ago, for 165 million euros.
That is, only in cash and properties Kim Kardsahian has about 300 million euros. And the valuation of it doubles that amount: it moves between 800 and 1,000 million. Kim Kardashian is a quasi-billionaire in her own right. Her businesses are yours alone. She and Kanye share properties (several lands and at least two mansions, valued in total at more than 100 million euros between land, houses and reforms), but each one runs the business on her own.
Kanye, the unlikely billionaire
The surprise in recent years has been given by Kanye. In 2014, when they got married, Kanye had brought in about 25 million euros. A respectable figure, in the first division of rappers, but that did not serve to cover up that, as he himself said, he owed about 45 million euros. His disastrous business in hospitality (the failure of a hamburger megafranchise that nearly sank him in 2011) and other investments had left him following in the wake of his idol Donald Trump: always looking for the next business to get out of the previous hole. Although Kanye was capable of turning everything he played musically into gold, and his potential as a musician placed him among the artists capable of taking hundreds of millions of euros (that is, in the division of Jay-Z or Drake, whom today eclipses) in the following years. Kim was aware of this and a few other realities of the rapper: she met him in 2000 and they were friends until they started a relationship in 2012, so hopefully he has a good prenup.
One that in theory exists, and which was signed when their fortunes were pointed in different ways (Kim's income exploded in 2014, after the wedding, and in the following years far exceeded that of her husband, whose potential fortune was superior to that of the Kardashian when they decided to marry). That agreement denotes the extent to which both underestimated their potential: the agreement stated that Kanye would pay Kim one million dollars for each year of marriage up to a maximum of 10 million (8.2 million euros), and that Kim would stay all the jewelry and gifts that Kanye would have given her.
Something that sounded good in the era in which both were fighting to be a hundred millionaires, but today could be dead paper, as another expert millionaire divorce lawyer told the gossip website Nicki Swift. Blame it on the Yeezy, the sneakers that Kanye brought out in his messianic times and whose company is 100% owned. Each Yeezys collection is a money wagon for both Kanye and the manufacturer and distributor, Adidas.
Kanye's manic episodes have put him on the verge of breaking up with Adidas several times (the last last summer, when he demanded a seat on the Adidas and GAP boards of directors, with whom he also has lucrative deals) but, until The rope is snapped, Yeezy was valued (just before the pandemic) at 2.5 billion euros, with the potential to become a brand of up to 40 billion euros. That, according to the Wall Street Journal. But even the less enthusiastic economic milieu has valued Yeezy above 1 billion euros. It is the sneakers that have made Kanye a billionaire, earning him a direct income of more than 100 million euros in 2020. And, if he sold the brand tomorrow, he would possibly surpass his sister-in-law Kylie as the Kardashian (or ex-Kardashian) with more money .
So what about divorce?
It takes a Laura Wasser. The prenuptial agreement can be challenged by either party because the fortunes of both have changed too much. And California law, which is quite unforgiving, states that in marriages that do not reach an agreement, all money is divided 50%. Something that, on paper, would leave both of them more or less as they are - neither West would take stock of KKW Beauty nor Kardashian of Yeezy, for example - and that would only raise one question: what about the mega-mansion of Hidden Hills, the more troublesome. Among other things because the house, of 15 million euros (and that cost another 15 to reform), belongs to Kanye; and the adjacent lands, including two other farms worth € 3 million and € 5 million, were bought by Kim to set up a mega-farm.
The rest of the properties would be more or less easy to divide. It is quite possible that Kanye kept the 1,821 hectare Wyoming ranch, acquired in September 2019, and where he wanted his wife and his children to move - one of the red lines for Kim. The ranch cost almost 11 million euros, and soon after the family spent another 11 million euros to buy the ranch next door. And perhaps the last of the Californian mansions they bought to annex to their Hidden Hills family mansion, something that would also ensure Kanye's closeness to the children. The remaining properties, including 6.5 million euros worth of undeveloped land in the exclusive hills of Los Angeles, would be put up for sale and shared between the two.
All this if Kim gets custody of the children, of course. Justice in California also tends to have as a common rule to leave the marital home to the party who stays with the children, to avoid adding the trauma of the move to the divorce, with which the Hidden Hills mansion (and that first expansion) they would stay in the hands of the Kardashian.
Is it difficult for Kim to get custody? Considering Kanye's history of mental health problems, his inconsistency in therapies and treatments, and the aggravated crises of his bipolar disorder in recent years, the rapper has it complicated. Worse, his public behavior is full of erratic and extravagant episodes, even without appreciating his disorder, and accentuated in recent years. What's more, with his fortunes more or less tied, and with Kardashian circles leaking to the press that what Kim wants is not money, but mental stability and to stop suffering from Kanye's episodes, custody would be taken for granted.
But that's also where Laura Wasser would come in, because the lawyer is famous for managing better than anyone else the most difficult part between celebrities with international careers and impossible schedules: children. Because right now, a 50% destructive divorce in court wouldn't make Kanye West or Kim Kardashian much richer than they were before they went to trial.
