Ye’s antisemitic remarks cost him adidas, Gap and Balenciaga within 17 days

Ye’s Twitter account went quiet on 8 Oct 2022. He’d posted that he was going “death con 3” on Jewish people, and Twitter locked him out for breaking its rules, a day after Meta had restricted his Instagram. The Anti-Defamation League told CNN that antisemitic myths had shaped his recent comments, “and it’s dangerous.”

Within 17 days Balenciaga, CAA, adidas and Gap had all cut ties.

Three of those four made most of what’s in this archive. adidas alone put the cost to itself at up to €250m in 2022.

He didn’t pull back in the meantime. On a podcast on 16 Oct he said, “I can say anti-Semitic things, and Adidas can’t drop me,” CNBC reported.

Nine days, four partners

Kering said on 21 Oct that Balenciaga had “no longer any relationship” with him. CAA dropped him on 24 Oct, and MRC shelved a finished documentary about him; its executives wrote that they couldn’t “support any content that amplifies his platform,” Variety reported.

adidas ended the partnership the next day. It stopped production of Yeezy products and all payments to Ye and his companies, and it said it owned the design rights to every existing shoe and colourway.

“Ye’s recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous.” adidas, press release, 25 Oct 2022

Gap pulled Yeezy Gap from its stores the same day, and Foot Locker said it wouldn’t support future Yeezy drops. Late that month Ye said in a YouTube video that he had “no association to any hate group.” He didn’t apologise.

December 2022: suspended again

On 1 Dec, on Alex Jones’s Infowars, Ye said he liked Hitler. Later that day he posted an image that merged a Nazi symbol with the Star of David, and Twitter, which Elon Musk had just bought, suspended him. “He again violated our rule against incitement to violence,” Musk wrote. Parler confirmed that its sale to Ye wasn’t going ahead.

An apology, a retraction, another apology

On 26 Dec 2023 he posted an apology in Hebrew on Instagram, saying it “was not my intention to offend or demean.”

In February 2025 he took it back. Over several days on X he called himself a Nazi and said he’d never apologise for his comments about Jewish people. His X account was deactivated on 10 Feb 2025.

On 26 Jan 2026 he took out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal headed “To Those I’ve Hurt.” “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite,” he wrote. NBC News reported that he put his behaviour down to a brain injury from a car accident 25 years earlier, which wasn’t diagnosed until 2023, and to bipolar type-1 disorder.

The ADL called the apology “long overdue.” It also said the ad “doesn’t automatically undo his long history of antisemitism.”