Kanye West’s Twitter attack on Forbes editor might come down to money

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Anyone trying to reach Randall Lane, the editor of Forbes Magazine, might wanna try email. Lane’s cell phone appeared to be shut off on Thursday, one day after rapper and US presidential candidate Kanye West shared his “mobile” number with 30 million Twitter followers whilst dubbing Lane a “white supremacist.” “If any of my fans …

Anyone trying to reach Randall Lane, the editor of Forbes Magazine, might wanna try email.

Lane’s cell phone appeared to be shut off on Thursday, one day after rapper and US presidential candidate Kanye West shared his “mobile” number with 30 million Twitter followers whilst dubbing Lane a “white supremacist.”

“If any of my fans want to call a white supremacist … this is the editor of Forbes,” West wrote along with a screenshot of his contact information for “Randall Forbes.”

The post was ultimately removed by Twitter, but not before generating close to 40,000 “likes.” West on Wednesday evening was also barred from Twitter for 12 hours, according to a tweet from his pal and ex-NBA player Rick Fox.

It’s unclear what started the feud and Lane has pooh-poohed West’s presidential ambitions. But when the singer/songwriter has gone head-to-head with Forbes before, it was largely over his net worth.

After he appeared on the cover the highly regarded money magazine in 2019, West griped that he hadn’t been declared a billionaire in the story written by Zack O’Malley Greenburg, a former child actor who played Lorenzo in the tear-jerker “Lorenzo’s Oil” starring Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon.

“I showed them a $890 million receipt, and they still didn’t say ‘billionaire,’” West reportedly said after the piece ran. “They don’t want us to know that we can buy land.”

When Forbes released its annual billionaires list in April 2020 without West, he blasted them again. “You know what you’re doing. You’re toying with me and I’m not finna lye [sic] down and take it anymore in Jesus name,” West texted at the time, according to Forbes. The fact that Kylie Jenner, West’s sister-in-law and founder of Kylie Cosmetics, made the closely watched list “clearly stuck in his craw,” Forbes claimed.

Not long after that scuffle, West agreed to share his financial records with the magazine founded in 1917 by B.C. Forbes, a financial columnist for Hearst papers. And Forbes quickly declared the artists behind “Love Lockdown” and “Heartless” a billionaire based in good part on his popular Yeezy sneakers, which are marketed by Addidas.

“Kayne West Is Now Officially a Billionaire (And He Really Wants the World to Know),” read the April headline.

But the dispute doesn’t appear to have stopped there. One reason may be that Forbes attached a $1.3-billion value to West’s budding empire, which is less than his claimed net worth of $3 billion. As a result, West was left out of the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, which requires a net worth of at least $2.1 billion.

The closely watched Forbes 400 list list landed just after Labor Day with the $3 billion slots going to Barry Diller, IAC/Interactive Corp. chairman, Las Vegas casino magnate Steve Wynn, real estate mogul Diane Kemper, and In-n-Out Burger heiress Lynsi Snyder.

Efforts to reach West were unsuccessful. Calls to Lane’s widely published mobile number led only to a busy signal. Forbes, meanwhile, is chalking the incident up to West’s mental illness. His famous wife, Kim Kardashian West, has said he suffers from bipolar disorder.

“We just wish him the best and have a lot of empathy for Kanye and everything he is going through,” said a Forbes spokesman. “We just hope he gets all the help he needs.”

West has also taken to jousting with Adidas and Gap to complain about his lack of a board seat with those companies, which do business with him.

“I DONT HAVE A BOARD SEAT AT GAP I DONT HAVE A BOARD SEAT AT ADIDAS … BLACK BOARD SEATS MATTER,” West tweeted earlier this month.

At a presidential campaign rally in July, he threatened to “walk away” from both companies unless he was given a board seat.