adidas and Ye fought for two years. Then ‘no one owes anybody anything’

“No one owes anybody anything anymore.” That’s how adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden summed up two years of fighting with Ye, on 29 Oct 2024. Both sides, he said, had withdrawn all their claims.

It’d started when adidas ended the Yeezy partnership on 25 Oct 2022. It stopped all payments to Ye and his companies and said it owned the design rights to every Yeezy product and colourway, past and new. What was left to fight over was money, and most of that fight happened where nobody could see it.

$51 million a year to promote the shoes

The deal went back to a 53-page licensing and endorsement agreement they’d signed in May 2016. On top of royalties it paid Ye a marketing fee to promote the shoes: $51 million in 2020, about 3% of net sales, Bloomberg reported. His payouts passed $200 million that year.

adidas went to federal court in New York to freeze $75 million of that marketing money so it couldn’t be moved. U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni refused. The main fight went to private arbitration, and details only came out by accident, when lawyers discussed them in open court at a hearing in May 2023. adidas said Ye and Yeezy LLC had “mishandled virtually all of the marketing funds.” Ye’s counterclaims, heavily redacted, accused adidas of copying his designs for its own cheaper shoes.

The shareholders sued adidas, not Ye

In April 2023 an investor fund took adidas to federal court in Portland, where the company has its North American headquarters. It said adidas hadn’t told investors what it knew about Ye’s behaviour. In August 2024 Judge Karin Immergut dismissed the case. The question wasn’t Ye’s conduct, she wrote, but whether adidas had misled investors, and it hadn’t.

“This Court does not condone what Ye allegedly did.” Judge Karin Immergut, via Legal Dive

October 2024: everything withdrawn

Gulden’s line came two months later, with the settlement. “Both parties said we don’t need to fight anymore and withdrew all the claims,” he said, Hypebeast and Sportico reported. In its 2024 accounts adidas released about €100 million it had set aside “following the Yeezy settlement”, and booked about the same amount for further donations.

The shareholders appealed, and they didn’t win that either. On 3 Dec 2025 the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal: “A reasonable investor would know that a partnership with a celebrity partner like Ye would come with inherent risks relating to improper behavior.”

That partnership, Reuters noted in its report on the ruling, had brought adidas about €1.5 billion of sales in 2021 alone.