When Kanye West pulled up alongside Alex Klein in his glistening Lamborghini and told him to “get in”, the tech CEO nearly spat out his falafel. But Klein, 31, a skinny “half Jewish, half Irish protestant kid from North London who grew up playing video games”, is exactly the sort of person “Ye” (as he’s now legally known) sweeps into his orbit.
The two had met once before — at the 2018 CES tech conference in Las Vegas, where Klein and his company Kano were debuting a self-build computer. “[Kanye] pulls his way through the crowds of people, bodyguards, fans, picks up the computer and says, ‘This is fresh’, holding it aloft,” recalls Klein.
From his car, a year later, the most famous rapper on the planet said to Klein, “isn’t it crazy that I saw you walking right there”. “Isn’t it crazy that your company’s called Kano, K-A-N, and I’m called Kanye, K-A-N.” Klein told him he wanted to build a project to take on Apple. “Let’s not say, I want,’’ replies West. “Let’s say, we will”. They made a quick joyride to West’s £60 mansion and signed a deal. “I am the greatest technology genius of the century”, says Klein from Miami where he’s now based. “Sorry. That was my inner Kanye.”
The result is Stem Player, a £200 music device on which the College Dropout rapper will exclusively release his new album, Donda 2 (sorry Apple, hard luck Spotify). It’s a squishy, flesh-coloured gadget that has no screen, meaning you listen to music and can remix it, DJing on the fly, using a few buttons and four touch-sensitive “stems”. They’re calling it “the best first generation product since the iPhone.”
They say they’ve made $2.2m in sales from the device in 24 hours, more revenue with the album not yet released than a live album would generate with 500 million streams. “We’re building a new company that is a fusion of Apple and Disney,” he says. “We want to redesign the world.” So if I had an idea, and I wondered around in London long enough, would Kanye come to me? “He’ll run ideas past a waiter at a restaurant, or someone sitting by him at a plane,” says Klein. If you have an open mind and an open heart good things” - Ye, in this case – “will come to you”.
If I was a megastar, I would be lazy and simply drop my album on Spotify or iTunes, I say. “It’s time for something new, something we can create and not just consume, something that we can control that doesn’t just control us”, says Klein, munching on a vegan salad. “Something that is instinctive and that feels healthy for our minds.” Klein used to be a “mega fanboy” of Apple. As a kid, he queued overnight on Oxford Street for the first iPhone and MacBook. A Harvard and Cambridge philosophy graduate, he taught himself to code. Becoming disillusioned with Apple’s “consumerist” philosophy, though, he founded his own company, Kano, with the aim of making designs that allowed the people to take back control.
For the last three years West has made frequent trips to Spitalfields, where Klein’s studio is, to talk about design. The rapper is prone to saying things like “God created man; man is God’s greatest technology” so “when we make technology, maybe it needs to be formed in our image.” (That’s why Stem Player is so squishy). What else do they talk about? “Taxes. Kanye loves taxes! They’re most people’s only direct encounter with the government and their only direct encounter with the public community.” Interesting, I say. Does Klein feel like he’s working for the next president of the United States? “Everything speaks very positively about his prospects for high executive office.” That’s a ‘Yes’ for Kanye 2024, I think.
Kanye is also funnier than people give him credit for, says Klein. “I don’t want to quote Ye without him on the call,” he says, when I ask for a Ye joke. “I’m sure he could tell a knock-knock joke”. They argue too. They fight. “A fire is made by rubbing two sticks together. Stones are turned into jewels by tumbling rocks. That’s what we do.” But they also co-parent. “With the Stem Player launch, Ye and I sat in a hotel room together like we’d just given birth to a baby together.”
Aged nine, Klein’s parents pulled him out of The Hall School in Hampstead to move to the US. He lost all his friends. “I became obsessed with this movie, The Matrix, and memorised every line of the script. You know, I started to feel like what if we are living in some kind of simulation”. His screen time became “obsessive”. Now he thinks “I’m a lot more grounded in God, and the word, and the world and physics”.
Kanye introduced him to “Elon [Musk]” and they toured the latter’s Starship base, “just a bunch of weirdos who like space rockets”. It had a “good vibe”. He was given a songwriting credit on Kanye’s last album, Jesus is King. Klein says he feels less lonely now. Of course he is. He’s got a friend in Ye.
