Kanye West Says IRS Froze Bank Accounts Because He Owes $50 Million in Taxes

Rapper Kanye West attends the WSJ Magazine 2019 Innovator Awards at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, on Nov. 6, 2019. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)

Kanye West claimed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) placed a hold on four of his bank accounts and said he owes the federal government $50 million in taxes.

West made that claim to YouTube host Tim Pool on Monday evening before he suddenly left the interview. West appeared in the interview with notorious Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and conservative media personality Milo Yiannopoulos, who is now working for the rapper’s presidential campaign.

The rapper and designer, who legally changed his name to Ye, told Pool that his “finance people” told him that he will “have to pay a lot of taxes.”

“I’m talking about literally finding out that they were trying to put me in prison this morning,” West said. “But I found out—okay, so they froze, they put a $75 million hold on four of my accounts.”

“And then they said, ‘You owe a lot of taxes.’ Took me like six hours to find out how much ‘a lot’ was,” Ye said. “Well, it was around $50 million.”

Elaborating, West said he’s “obviously not the most financially literate person on the planet,” and that he had approached different individuals involved in his businesses to determine a remedy.

“So now I’m having—I get to actually learn how to run a company. I get to learn how to, you know, to count, really,” he said. “It’s like I didn’t even know where to put the money.”

During the podcast, West also asked about whether he could run for president while in jail, and said he was trying to purchase a bank. Earlier in November, he announced a 2024 presidential bid, although records show he hasn’t filed paperwork to run.

West stated: “I was just a child basically. When you become famous, you stop growing at that point. I became famous at age 24. I had handlers around. I had my mom around. I had different things, and it was always you go from one handler to the next handler to the next handler.”

Later in the episode, Pool asked West about controversial social media statements he made about Jews. Those comments caused Adidas and Balenciaga to sever ties with the rapper.

West said the media’s labels of him being an anti-semite “isn’t true.”

“If you read the definition [of anti-semite], it says you can’t claim that there’s multiple people inside of banks or media that are all Jewish or you’re anti-semitic,” he added. “But that’s the truth.”

“I’m literally gonna walk the [expletive] off the show if I’m sitting up here having to, you know, talk about, ‘You can’t say that it was Jewish people that did it,’ when every sensible person knows that,” West added.

When Pool asked West to elaborate, he then got up from his chair and walked out of the room. Fuentes and Yiannopoulos, who both said little during the interview, followed him.

Presidential Run

In a video released last week, West said that he’s running for president because he wants the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “to look at my money.”

It’s not clear why the FCC, a U.S. agency that regulates communications, would or even need to investigate his finances.

“I went from being a multi-billionaire to not being able to use my Apple Pay four nights ago,” West said in a video last week.

“The reason why I’m announcing that I’m running for president is I want the FCC to look at my money,“ he said. ”If the FCC was looking at my money, there would be a possibility that Adidas wouldn’t have went into JP Morgan Chase and froze my account ... and put a $75 million hold on four different accounts.”

Trump Meeting

Over the weekend, more controversy erupted when it was reported West, Fuentes, and others in West’s entourage had dinner with former President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort. That incident prompted mainstream media outlets, self-described conservative news outlets, and some Republicans to criticize the former president for having dinner with alleged anti-semites.

Trump wrote Saturday that West showed up “with 3 people, two of which I didn’t know, the other a political person who I haven’t seen in years“ and, according to him, ”I told him don’t run for office, a total waste of time, can’t win.”

“I help a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black, Ye (Kanye West), who has been decimated in his business and virtually everything else, and who has always been good to me, by allowing his request for a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, alone, so that I can give him very much needed ‘advice,'” he added.

The Epoch Times has contacted the IRS for comment.