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Benzinga
Benzinga
Business
Maureen Meehan

Kanye, Get A Grip! Taking On Shaquille O'Neal's Business Practices Not A Great Idea But What Else Is New?

Shaquille O'Neal shot back at Kanye West after the Trump-supporting rapper publicly opined on the NBA Hall of Famer's business affairs.  

After getting bumped recently from Instagram and before that Facebook/Meta (NASDAQ: META), West took his griping to Twitter (NYSE:TWTR). On Thursday, reported XXL, West was apparently attempting to expose bad business practices in the entertainment industry and decided to dump on Shaq. O'Neal is in business with Jamie Salter, the Canadian billionaire CEO of Authentic Brands Group, which bought Adidas' (OTCQX:ADDYY) Reebok brand in August 2021 for approximately $2.5 billion. 

"Jaimie first said he’s 50/50 with David Beckham and 50/50 with Shaq. I said 'Jamie There’s no such thing as 50/50 in business. Who has the extra 1 percent for the control and voting rights,'" wrote Kanye who now calls himself Ye. 

Meanwhile, Shaq O'Neal, four-time NBA champ-turned-entrepreneur took exception to what Ye was implying.

"Believe me you don’t know me like that," Shaq replied to Kanye's post. "Worry about your business, and to quote the once great Kanye West 'I got more money than you, so why would i listen to you.' Take my advice get your family business in order. Have a great day brother."

Kanye's Crappy Month

The business, sports and entertainment industries seem to have had enough of Kanye's anti-Semitic and racist rants, which have gotten louder and louder. The outrages include wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt to his YZY SZN 9 fashion show during Paris Fashion Week in early October. Things went quickly downhill from there.

While in the midst of his recent anti-semitic spew - nothing new by the way - he stepped over the line and made some repugnant and severely false remarks about how George Floyd died. 

In an appearance on a hip-hop podcast, West said it wasn't Derek Chauvin’s knee on Floyd's neck for 9½ minutes that killed him, but that he died from a mixture of fentanyl mixed with cannabis. Chauvin's knee "wasn't even on his neck like that," West said in the podcast. The remarks, for which he later apologized, resulted in a $250 million lawsuit filed by Roxie Washington, the mother of Floyd's 8-year-old daughter Giana.

Kanye then went on to compare himself to George Floyd saying "Because God has showed me by what Adidas is doing, by what the media is doing, I know how it feels to have a knee on my neck now.”

Adidas was among the string of companies that have cut ties with Ye, including fashion company Balenciaga and banker JP Morgan Chase (NYSE: JPM).

Photo: Benzinga creation with LongJon and Lev Radin by Shutterstock

 

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