Laying low for the first week of 2025, rapper Kanye West now known as Ye took a swipe at his former partner Adidas, criticizing the company’s search engine practice on the 7th of January.
In an Instagram post, Ye also took issue with designer Jerry Lorenzo.
When fans search for Yeezy on Google that Adidas is the first to come up before his own website, which the rapper believes is done intentionally to hurt his brand even though the apparel giant severed ties with him in 2022 over his repeated antisemitic remarks.
“When you google Yeezy.com the adidas site comes before the Yeezy site Members at adidas Stop doing this Stop doing your moves to hold me back Our partnership is done You’re a 60 billion dollar company that froze my accounts,” he wrote alongside a screenshot of his search results.
Ye added ”(When Billboard did a Google search for “yeezy,” Adidas does come up as the first result, but a search for “yeezy.com” has the Yeezy website coming up as the top result.) “Now I’m back on my feet (no pun intended) and I’m not going to stand for this (no pun again) I did phenomenal work for you guys and because I stood up for myself yall tried to intimidate and oppress me everyone remembers I had major issues with adidas because of design theft and oppression before ‘the tweet.’”
The rapper and Fear God designer Lorenzo were collaborators in the 2010’s until they stopped working together in 2016. In his post, he criticized Lorenzo for continuing to work with Adidas. In2020, Fear God joined forces with Adidas for an athletic line, and the deal included the designer as creative director of Adidas Basketball.
Ye continued “Y’all know Jerry was corny and disloyal for doing work with adidas after the way they handled things I still showed up to his show that was a copy of my Hollywood bowl show being the so called bigger man but I’m never doing that again for no one It’s Yeezy over everything,”
For the rapper, he4 is done with the collaborations and those he believes are using him to create imitations of his work, as he’s “here to dominate as I always have.”