Kanye West said in February 2016 that he was $53 million in personal debt and publicly appealed to technology billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page for investment in his ideas. West asked Zuckerberg for $1 billion to support his ventures, including Donda, an ambitious project he had pitched to investors as spanning fields from fashion and publishing to alternative energy and transportation. The reports could not independently verify the state of his finances.

West’s appeals drew attention to his existing ties with 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 Elon Musk’s SpaceX factory. He also reportedly spent time at Apple’s Southern California offices with music executive Jimmy Iovine. The connections reflected a broader interest among entertainers and technology leaders in one another’s industries.

In response to West’s debt claim, Minnesota graphic designer Jeremy Piatt created a GoFundMe campaign titled “Get Kanye Out of Debt.” His appeal humorously invoked West’s own declarations of artistic greatness and compared potential donors to the Medici family, who supported Renaissance artists. Piatt said he wanted to raise awareness of arts funding and allow individuals to support creative work. One report said the campaign had raised $35 at publication; another reported $50 by Tuesday afternoon. Piatt said only West or his team would be able to withdraw the money. A separate campaign organized by Robert Kulik in Washington, D.C., reportedly raised nothing and appeared to have been canceled.

The appeals coincided with the release of West’s album *The Life of Pablo* and the debut of a clothing collection at New York Fashion Week. The album’s initial availability through Tidal prompted complaints from some customers who said they had paid for downloads they did not receive; it was also reportedly downloaded illegally more than 500,000 times. On one track, West claimed credit for Taylor Swift’s fame. Accepting a Grammy for album of the year, Swift responded with a message encouraging young women to focus on their work despite people who try to take credit for their accomplishments.

Another passage surveys unusual crowdfunding appeals. It describes a woman seeking $10,000 for a round-the-world spiritual journey and a New Yorker who raised more than $1,000 toward removing a “420” tattoo from her forehead to improve her job prospects. The supplied material also notes that Alexa Internet has donated web crawl data to the Internet Archive since 1996 for eventual inclusion in the Wayback Machine, and explains that Twitter users can control location sharing on individual tweets and delete their location history.