Adidas has settled its legal battle with former business partner Kanye West, with the sportswear company’s CEO saying that a dispute that has rumbled on for two years now “belongs to the past”.
West’s incredibly lucrative partnership with Adidas, which sold products using his Yeezy fashion brand, came to an abrupt end in October 2022 after he made a series of controversial and antisemitic comments. The sudden early axing of the partnership resulted in various legal disputes.
However, those have now come to an end, according to Adidas CEO Bjorn Gulden. According to the BBC, he revealed during a conference call that there are “no more open issues” between his company and the rapper, after a legal settlement was reached. He didn’t expand greatly on what that settlement involved, except to say “there is no money going either way”.
“There were tensions on many issues”, Gulden admitted, but both sides ultimately decided “we don't need to fight any more”. He went on, “When you have conflicts like this, you take provisions and you have legal opinions, and there are negotiations, and there are settlements being done, and this is the end to it”.
Concluding, he added, “No-one owes anything to anybody anymore. Whatever was is history”.
Many of West’s business partners - including those in the music industry - cut their ties with the rapper following his antisemitic rants on social media and elsewhere in autumn 2022. Though the end of the Adidas partnership was particularly notable, given how profitable it had been for both parties.
The sportswear company was sitting on more than a billion dollars of Yeezy stock when its partnership with West collapsed. It has been selling those products off in batches ever since, donating the proceeds to organisations including the Anti-Defamation League and Robert Kraft’s Foundation To Combat Antisemitism. Adidas now says that all that stock will have been sold by the end of this year.
