Nike Offered to Pay Kanye $4 Million USD a Year to Stay

Kanye West predicted that HYPEBEAST would be posting his recent lecture at SAIC (where he received his Honorary Doctorate), and his guesstimation was right. Among the variety of topics he delved into, Dr. West mentioned that his reason for leaving Nike was due to the fact that he wasn’t entitled to a percentage of earnings due to the fact that he isn’t an athlete. However, Nike offered him $4 million USD a year to stay, which as we all know, he turned down and went to adidas. Check out our favorite excerpts below, and head to HYPETRAK for more music-related news.

I remember at that time, I was going through leaving Nike and going to adidas, and I was also dealing with trying to get a deal with a luxury house. Because I wanted to paint, but I wanted to paint with usable art. Sculptures equals clothing. Clothing is a form of usable art. And I would look at that lamp that was made of rocks and cement, but the shape was so beautiful, and it wasn’t even made of marble.

So when it was time to do the adidas collection, and I left Nike because they refused to give me a percentage because I was not an athlete—I don’t have a NDA that says I can’t say this even though it seems wrong to say out loud—I left Nike because they refused to give me a percentage, they also offered me $4 million a year to stay, which is an unknown thing but I’m sure it’ll show up on HYPEBEAST tomorrow.

[Laughter]

I wanted people to know that.

[More Laughter]

And I still left them, because they weren’t giving me the opportunity to grow. They were working off an old business model, and Phil Knight was somewhere on an island. And then, Mark Parker would go and find people who I collaborated with years before, and try to do collaborations with them to seem cool, and as you see, Nike hasn’t done like, one cool thing this year.