Kanye West on business: what the evidence says · JRE #1554
SUBJECT: BUSINESS
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
That was half of the value of Universal at the time of six billion due to the Internet, which the music industry was afraid of in 2000. Universal.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Kanye West claimed Universal Music Group (UMG) was worth about six billion dollars around the time of the 2014 Beats Electronics sale to Apple, attributing a depressed valuation to music-industry fears about the internet dating back to 2000. The 2014 Beats Electronics acquisition by Apple, which West appears to be referencing as a historical marker, was itself valued at about $3 billion and did not directly set or reflect UMG's valuation. Contemporary reporting from a few years later does not support a $6 billion figure for UMG: in 2017, Vivendi's own CEO estimated UMG's value at around $40 billion, with another analyst estimate cited by Reuters at about $21 billion, both far above $6 billion. Since valuations of this kind generally rise over time rather than fall, these later, much higher estimates make a $6 billion figure for UMG in the 2014 era look like a significant understatement or misremembering, though no contemporaneous 2014 valuation of UMG itself was found to confirm the exact figure at that time.