We know Kanye West is an eccentric billionaire in addition to his work as an innovative musician and designer but is it true that he purchased and owns a mountain?
Kanye West’s latest property includes a full mountain range, and it’s already been used by him as a muse for various creative projects including album covers, music videos, and him and his wife’s future retirement home.
The multi-hyphenate (though not in the traditional sense) Kanye West has added a mountain to the list of things he can lay legal claim to. Is this a spur of the moment decision or is it a feasible buy? Read on to know the fun backstory!
Kanye West Likes Letting Us Know He’s A Billionaire
Kanye West has never been one to shy away from ambition. His voracity and hunger for what he wants is well-documented by fans and the media alike. As of April 2020, while the entire world was living in lockdown and fear, it was reported that Yeezus had finally ascended to billionaire status. This is not just from album sales; West is a designer, a hip-hop mogul in terms of production and the power and that numbers his record label pulls, as well as having earned the right to be called a magnate of the footwear world.
His billionaire status doesn’t just come out of nowhere. West has been very public about the climb to get to billionaire level, speaking out at panels and in articles about how he was snubbed by publications that “didn’t know how to count”. While West claims racism behind this, we can’t imagine that living in a family of “self-made” (as they claim) fellow billionaires and multi-millionaires is doing his competitiveness any favors.
How Kanye Got His Now-Iconic Mountains
It was first reported in mid-2017 that Kanye was working on new music “on a mountain”, in seclusion. That new music turned out to be a pair of albums, solo album ye and KIDS SEE GHOSTS with Kid Cudi, as well as production work for other rappers including Pusha-T’s Daytona, Nasir by Nas, and Teyana Taylor’s K.T.S.E., with all five albums being dubbed the “Wyoming Sessions” in an ode to the state housing those glorious mountain ranges that apparently did wonders for Ye’s creativity.
The mountains went on to feature on the album cover for 2018’s ye, a couple of music videos and lyric videos all praised for the gorgeous aesthetic sense (juxtaposed against the dark imagery of the lyrics in most cases), and even cropping up on apparel, in the themes for celebrations in the Kanye camp, and more, making the Wyoming mountains a cultural phenomenon in their own right.
These mountains – part of the Teton Range at Jackson Hole – might have served as inspiration for West to purchase a property close to where the family spent all this time bunked up in isolation and nature-consciousness, with a few beautiful mountain ranges thrown in for good measure.
In fact, Kanye West does not own one ranch in Wyoming, but two: Monster Lake Ranch in 2018, and then Bighorn Mountain Ranch in 2019, near Cody and Greybull, respectively. This is the realization of Kanye’s family’s dream, it seems, given the Kim Kardashian West interview in Vogue Arabia from the same month that the news of the purchase broke where Kim told Kanye she saw herself “living on a ranch in Wyoming” for the majority of her time when asked where she sees herself in ten years.
With this purchase, it’s not just that Kanye owns a mountain, however: he owns two full mountain ranges, in addition to two private lakes on the property (not counting the real estate, including restaurants, saloons, cabins, and event buildings).