Kanye West failed to impress Divesh Makan.
It was an unusual pairing: Makan, a disarming, strong-willed investor with a world-class Rolodex and a commitment to absolute discretion, and West, a maximally bombastic and unrestrained rapper whose life has played out almost entirely in the public eye.
The two were brought together as a result of Makan s constant drive to expand his network of clients, a list that includes Mark Zuckerberg and Tom Hanks. At stake for West was admission to Silicon Valley s most exclusive club: Iconiq Capital.
Makan s standards are exacting, however, and Yeezy didn t make the cut. An initial meeting between the two went nowhere, and in subsequent conversations with his employees, the Iconiq founder was dismissive of West, whose frequent tabloid appearances and brushes with controversy had the potential for a public-relations risk. (A spokesperson for West declined to comment.)
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It was one of the searing images of the rioting in downtown Chicago last summer: a man wearing a Joker mask standing in front of a police sport-utility vehicle engulfed in flames.
The graffiti-strewn SUV was one of seven Chicago Police Department vehicles and one CTA vehicle torched in the Loop last May 30. More than 60 other arson fires were reported across the city over the next few days of anti-police rioting sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis after a white police officer kept his knee on the neck of Floyd, who was Black.
The fires set downtown by rioters after Floyd’s death were only one element, though, in a year that saw a major increase in arson. Over the course of 2020, hundreds of other arson fires were reported in Chicago. The number of fires authorities deemed suspicious was up nearly 65% last year over 2019, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of city crime data shows.