Kanye West said in February 2016 that he was $53 million in personal debt and appealed to technology leaders, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google cofounder Larry Page, to invest in his ideas. West asked Zuckerberg for $1 billion to help realize Donda, an ambitious venture he had pitched to investors as spanning fields from fashion and publishing to alternative energy. The reports could not independently verify the state of his finances.

West’s appeals drew attention to his relationships in Silicon Valley. He had met or socialized with figures including venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, Dropbox chief executive Drew Houston and Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom, and had visited SpaceX. He also reportedly spent time at Apple’s Southern California offices, despite saying his new album, *The Life of Pablo*, would be exclusive to the streaming service Tidal.

In response to West’s debt claim, Minnesota graphic designer Jeremy Piatt created a GoFundMe page called “Get Kanye Out of Debt.” Its appeal was playful: it acknowledged West’s personal wealth while calling on fans to support his artistic ambitions as the Medici family had supported Renaissance artists. Piatt said he wanted to raise awareness of arts funding and hoped West would learn about the campaign. At the times the reports were published, it had raised between $35 and $50. Piatt said that, under an arrangement with GoFundMe, only West or his team could withdraw the money. A separate campaign organized by Robert Kulik in Washington, D.C., raised nothing and appeared to have been canceled.

West’s financial appeals coincided with the release of *The Life of Pablo* and the debut of a clothing collection at New York Fashion Week. The album’s release on Tidal reportedly encountered problems: some fans who paid to download it said they did not receive it, and it was reportedly downloaded illegally more than 500,000 times. A lyric in which West claimed credit for Taylor Swift’s fame also drew attention; Swift responded in a Grammy acceptance speech by urging young women not to let others claim credit for their accomplishments.

Another passage described a compilation of unusual crowdfunding campaigns. Among them were a request for $10,000 to fund a round-the-world spiritual journey and a campaign that raised more than $1,000 to remove a “420” forehead tattoo. The supplied material also noted that Alexa Internet donated web crawl data to the Internet Archive for eventual inclusion in the Wayback Machine, and that Twitter users could control whether to add locations to tweets and delete their location history.