Kanye West said in February 2016 that he was $53 million in personal debt and appealed to technology billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page to invest in his ideas. He asked Zuckerberg for $1 billion to help address his debts and develop Donda, an ambitious venture spanning fields such as fashion, publishing and technology. The passages say West’s financial situation could not be independently verified.

West’s appeals drew attention to his longstanding connections in Silicon Valley. He had pitched Donda to investors and maintained ties with venture capitalist Ben Horowitz and Dropbox chief executive Drew Houston, among others. He also reportedly visited Apple’s Southern California office and had met Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom. West complained on Twitter that technology leaders had met with him but had not helped fund his ideas.

In response to West’s debt claim, Minnesota graphic designer Jeremy Piatt created a GoFundMe campaign called “Get Kanye Out of Debt.” The appeal humorously acknowledged West’s personal wealth while invoking his claims to be a great artist. Piatt compared the proposed support to the patronage of artists by Italy’s Medici family and said the campaign aimed to raise awareness of arts funding. It had raised $35 when one report was published and $50 by Tuesday afternoon, according to another. Piatt said he could not withdraw the money and that only West or his team would be able to claim it. A separate campaign organized by Robert Kulik reportedly raised nothing and appeared to have been canceled.

The appeals came as West released *The Life of Pablo* through the Tidal streaming service and debuted a clothing collection at New York Fashion Week. One report said the album was briefly pulled from Tidal and had reportedly been illegally downloaded more than 500,000 times. A lyric claiming credit for Taylor Swift’s fame also drew attention after Swift used her Grammy acceptance speech to tell young women to focus on their work despite people who might take credit for their accomplishments.

Other supplied material describes a list of unusual crowdfunding campaigns, including a request for $10,000 for a round-the-world spiritual journey and a campaign that raised more than $1,000 to remove a forehead tattoo. It also notes that Alexa Internet has donated web crawl data to the Internet Archive since 1996 for eventual inclusion in the Wayback Machine. A Twitter notice explains that users can add a location to tweets, switch the feature on or off, and delete their location history.