What’s at stake for the Kimye divorce?
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After months of leading increasingly separate lives, Kim filed for divorce on February 19 citing irreconcilable differences. She is seeking joint legal and physical custody of their four children, North, 7, Saint, 5, Chicago, 3, and Psalm West, 21 months.
However, after close to seven years of marriage and four children together, there was some paperwork to be done, the couple was not interested in a messy split. Kim waited to file for divorce until after she and Kanye had reached an agreement as to the division of their assets by communicating through a lawyer.
They had sizeable wealth before their $2.8 million wedding in Florence in 2014, and have exponentially more to their names now. But their most visible assets such as their family home in Hidden Hills, Calif, that Kim’s mom Kris Jenner proudly informed the world was worth $60 million make up a relatively small fraction of their combined net worth, which stands at $2.1 billion, according to Forbes.
“You’d think with a number that huge and a divorce that big it would be super complicated,” Forbes staff writer Madeline Berg told E! News. “It’s actually pretty simple because both Kanye and Kim are these successful independent entrepreneurs.”
When Kim’s KKW Beauty brand was valued at $1 billion last June, Kanye congratulated her on Twitter, “I am so proud of my beautiful wife Kim Kardashian West for officially becoming a billionaire,” he wrote alongside a carefully composed photo of two garden tomatoes and some flowers. “You’ve weathered the craziest storms and now God is shining on you and our family. So blessed this is still life / So I made you this still life / We love you so much.”
Last month, Coty bought a 20% stake in KKW beauty for a reported $200 million, bringing Kim’s personal fortune to an estimated $750 million, including $250 million from Keeping up with the Kardashians, modeling, her mobile app, and other ventures. She launched her SKIMS line of shapewear in 2019 and Nordstrom added the brand to its stock a year ago. Not surprisingly, when they rolled out face masks last May, they sold out immediately (and Skims donated 10,000 masks to COVID-19 relief efforts).
While Kanye’s said to be worth roughly $1.26 billion (“It’s $3.3 billion since no one at Forbes knows how to count,” the rapper apparently texted Forbes after it reported that sum last year), much of that is made up of his Yeezy shoe empire, which he owns 100 percent of and produces in collaboration with Adidas, collecting 11 percent of the revenue.
He founded his label G.O.O.D. Music in 2014 and, in a bid to regain control of his master recordings, in 2019 he sued Universal Music Group to get out of his contract. A separate suit he filed against Sony/ATV-owned EMI was settled that fall. Bloomberg reported that Valentiam Group, which specializes in putting a value on such things, had estimated his music catalog to be worth roughly $110.5 million.
Their tangible assets include two homes in the celeb-favored gated comm unity/city of Hidden Hills, having purchased a smaller house for $3 million next to the 15,000 square foot mansion they bought in 2014 for $20 million and spent at least $20 million renovating over the course of three years.
They added to their real estate portfolio in 2018, buying a four bedroom condo in Miami Beach high rise for $15.5 million. Then it’s Kanye who reportedly bought the Wyoming properties, Monster Lake Ranch for $14 million in September 2019 and Bighorn mountain Ranch two months later for $14.5 million.
According to documents reviewed by Forbes, their assets also include $5 million in art, nearly $4 million in vehicles, $3.2 million in jewelry and $300,000 worth of livestock living in Wyoming.
They do have a prenup and thus the divorce is expected to be amicable.
Meanwhile, the pair obviously enhanced each other’s profile over the past decade, since they first confirmed that they were a couple in 2012. Kanye has waxed poetic over the unparalleled reach of Kim’s influence as a fashion icon and business and social media mastermind, while Kim has called her husband nothing short of a genius. They’ve been on the cover of Vogue as a couple and Kim’s whole family has spent a considerable amount of time as walking advertisements for the Yeezy brand. And while he obviously was already a multiplatinum-selling recording star before coupling with Kim, his platform grew wider when he started to appear on Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which will be wrapping up this spring after its 20th season. Together, their pop culture footprints only multiplied.
While Yeezy has a devoted following and did $1.3 billion in sales in 2019, Berg from Forbes ventures said that Kim’s got the stronger brand name at the moment. “There are more Kardashians than there are Kanye Wests, and they each have successful business endeavors, and they’re not going anywhere,” she says. “If anything, I think Kanye West may suffer a little bit. I think a big part of the Yeezy brand was supported by Kim, and she has a stronger social media following. She has a bigger presence right now, at least than Kanye West. So it will be really interesting to see kind of how active he is, how public he is. And then, what happens with Yeezy from there. ” For Kim, it is being said that the more finesse she handles the divorce with, the more increase there would be in her brand image and her, therefore, her worth.
