Kanye West said in February 2016 that he was $53 million in personal debt and appealed for financial help to develop his creative ideas. He asked Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google cofounder Larry Page to invest $1 billion, linking his financial struggles to his ambitions for Donda, a venture he had pitched as spanning fields from fashion and publishing to alternative energy. The reports could not independently verify the state of his finances.

West had longstanding connections in Silicon Valley. He was acquainted with venture capitalist Ben Horowitz and Dropbox chief executive Drew Houston, had dined with Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom, and reportedly spent time at Apple’s Southern California office. His outreach reflected broader ties between entertainers seeking business opportunities and technology executives interested in the music industry.

In response to West’s debt claim, Minnesota graphic designer Jeremy Piatt created a GoFundMe campaign called “Get Kanye Out of Debt.” Piatt’s appeal combined praise for West’s artistry with a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment that the celebrity could afford luxuries. He compared the proposed crowdfunding effort to the Medici family’s patronage of Renaissance artists and said his broader goal was to raise awareness of support for the arts. One report put donations at $35; another said $50 had been pledged by Tuesday afternoon. Piatt said he could not withdraw the money and that only West or his team could receive it. A separate campaign by Robert Kulik reportedly raised nothing and appeared to have been canceled.

The fundraising efforts came as West released *The Life of Pablo* on Tidal and presented a clothing collection at New York Fashion Week. One report said the album was pulled from the service shortly after appearing and was widely downloaded illegally amid complaints from customers. A lyric claiming credit for Taylor Swift’s fame also drew attention after Swift used her Grammy acceptance speech to urge young women to resist people who take credit for their accomplishments.

The supplied material also describes a critical list of unusual crowdfunding appeals, including a request for $10,000 for a spiritual trip around the world and a campaign that raised more than $1,000 to remove a forehead tattoo. Other passages explain Twitter’s optional location tagging and say Alexa Internet’s crawl data is added to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine after an embargo period.