Amid reported tax issues, Kanye West settles Wyoming debt

POWELL — Kanye West and his businesses may owe more than $50 million in taxes, but they appear mostly all square with the State of Wyoming.

Now known as Ye, the musician and entrepreneur left behind tens of thousands of dollars worth of IOUs to the state when he and his businesses pulled out of Cody in 2021.

Earlier this year, the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services filed $75,400 worth of liens against two of West’s limited liability companies in Park County.

The liens showed that Psalm Cody Ranch — which holds West’s sprawling ranch south of Cody — and Yeezy Footwear — affiliated with his now-defunct partnership with Adidas — failed to pay workers’ compensation premiums while operating in Wyoming.

Employers are required to pay into the state fund to cover lost wages and medical bills stemming from on-the-job injuries, but the liens suggest West’s businesses failed to make those payments from the time he arrived in Cody in late 2019 to the shuttering of his local enterprises in the latter part of 2021.

However, on Nov. 29 and 30, a workforce services staffer signed off on paperwork to release the liens, indicating West’s businesses had paid the premiums, penalties and interest they owed.

Other creditors of West’s have not been as fortunate, as his business empire has crumbled amid a series of bizarre and antisemitic comments.

The same day workforce services agreed to release two of the three liens in Park County, West announced that he owed around $50 million in taxes.

Speaking on the Timcast IRL podcast, West said a $75 million hold had just been placed on several of his bank accounts.

“I tell all of my finance people [to] never use the term ‘a lot,’ but they said, ‘OK, you’re going to have to pay a lot of taxes,’” West said on the Nov. 29 broadcast.

A subsequent review of tax liens by NBC News found that West’s businesses also owe $600,000 to the State of California.

“I’m obviously not the most financially literate person on the planet,” West said on Timcast IRL, explaining that after becoming famous as a young man, other people have handled his affairs. “So now … I get to actually learn how to run a company; I get to learn how to, you know, to count,” he said.

There have been substantially fewer dollars for West to count in recent months.

Forbes dropped its estimate of West’s net worth from $2 billion to $400 million in October, after the sportswear giant Adidas terminated its lucrative partnership with West and Yeezy.

Other businesses have also cut ties with West after he said he would be going “death con 3 on Jewish people,” among other remarks.

More recently, he’s praised Adolf Hitler and defended Nazis.

In his Timcast IRL interview, West claimed that “they” — an apparent reference to Jewish people — were “trying to put me in prison” over the unpaid taxes.

He later walked off the set when podcast host Tim Pool contended it was corporate media and not the Jewish people who were being unfair to West.

Before leaving, West also suggested divine intervention was at play in his financial troubles.

“God is using me,” he said. “He’s breaking me down, removing all of the ‘richest person,’ all of this, so I can serve him. And the more and more those things are taken away from me, the more I can be empty and be a vessel and be able to be used.”

West arrived in Cody not long after one of the city’s major employers, Cody Laboratories, shut down operations.

When West laid out plans for a Yeezy campus at his ranch south of town and set up a prototype lab at Cody Labs’ former warehouse on Road 2AB, it raised hopes that he could help fill the gap left by the pharmaceutical manufacturer.

Company payroll data is confidential, but the public liens filed by the Department of Workforce Services indicate that, at their peak in mid-2020, Psalm Cody Ranch and Yeezy Footwear’s monthly payroll likely reached into the low six figures.

“In total, around 90 staffers either temporarily moved [to the Cody ranch] or commuted into Wyoming via a private plane that departed weekly early Monday morning and returned Friday night,” Rolling Stone reported last month.

However, the influx of jobs would prove fleeting.

Rolling Stone’s recent reporting described West as erratic — screaming, throwing books and showing staff sexually explicit images — and the operations as chaotic.

“He might ask a chef to make a song and an architect to be his personal assistant,” one former Cody staffer told Rolling Stone. “He may ask a song producer to design a school, and the next day that becomes an orphanage, and the other days it becomes an airport.”

By the end of 2020, about a year into West’s tenure in Cody, he’d paused his plans for the area.

Forward Cody CEO James Klessens, who had initially called West’s arrival “so fortuitous,” expressed concern.

In an interview on KODI-AM, Klessens said Yeezy appeared to be “stacking marbles,” with successes quickly followed by things falling apart again.

Yeezy’s activity picked back up in 2021, but by that October, operations had shut down and West put his Park County properties up for sale. The manufacturing facility on Road 2AB is now vacant again, still owned by Cody Labs and listed for $2.2 million.

An adjoining warehouse owned by Forward Cody that was leased to Cody Labs’ parent company and subleased to West is also vacant. While West is reportedly all square with Forward Cody and has apparently paid off his debts to workforce services, it appears he may still owe thousands of dollars to a different arm of the state government.

The Secretary of State’s Office has dissolved five West-affiliated LLCs over the past two months — including Psalm Cody Ranch — after they failed to file annual reports and pay the associated taxes; two other companies — including Yeezy Footwear — are set to be dissolved next month unless their delinquent reports are filed.

The amount of money West owes depends on the value of the property his businesses held in the state over the past year. Prior reports for the seven Westaffiliated enterprises indicated they held more than $82.2 million worth of assets in the state, yielding a bill of around $16,200 to the Secretary of State’s Office.

But the debt for the past year could be smaller, given that West and Yeezy have drastically scaled back their presence in the Cody area.

In June, for example, West’s Psalm Cody Commercial sold the last of the seven pieces of property that he once owned inside the City of Cody, along Big Horn Avenue.

He also listed his Cody ranch for sale in late 2021, seeking $11 million, but pulled it off the market in August.

As of this week, the 3,888-acre property and another 6,700-acre ranch in the Bighorn Mountains remained in West’s hands, awaiting his next move.