Barstool Sports founder/owner/CEO Dave Portnoy has recently attracted significant attention in the cryptocurrency universe for a number of trades, projects, and public stances. One of the latter got him on the radar of controversial rapper Kanye West.
Wearing a shirt featuring a swastika (similar to the shirts that were on his Yeezy apparel website following his Super Bowl ad in some local markets), West went off on Portnoy in a video posted to X Sunday. That came after Portnoy blasted West Saturday, calling him the “worst human alive” for his praise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and claiming West’s upcoming plans for a crypto coin are “a scam meme coin.” West’s response video has since been deleted from X, but England’s The Daily Mail preserved it on their TikTok feed:
@dailymail Kanye West responded to Dave Portnoy on X after the Barstool Sports chief labeled his meme coin a scam. On Saturday, Portnoy ranted about the rapper on X, naming West the ‘worst human alive’ while making his claims about the coins. Shortly after, West posted a now-deleted video to respond to Portnoy’s claims. While wearing a swastika shirt, Earlier this month, Portnoy branded West ‘one of the greatest pieces of s*** of all time’ after the rapper went on a sickening social media rampage praising Hitler. Read more on DailyMail.com 🎥X/YE #kanyewest #ye #daveportnoy #barstoolsports #rapper #news #usa ♬ original sound – Daily Mail
There, West says “So Dave Portnoy, I don’t know you. I saw you was tweeting. I have no idea who you are. We were going back and forth joking. But when you start talking about—telling people that my coin is not real and you’re tryna play with my money. Nah, this is the last time where we’re going to be talking online.”
That’s a more coherent and focused response from West than what we’ve seen with many of his recent comments. But it’s interesting that his only cited issue there appears to be Portnoy calling his coin (possibly dubbed a “Swasticoin“) a scam, and that his only actual response is that he won’t talk to Portnoy online. And what he actually says is rather overshadowed by him wearing a swastika shirt.
Of course, it maybe shouldn’t be surprising that West is again associated with swastikas following that firestorm–causing Super Bowl ad. He’s made it quite clear how he feels about that symbol and about Hitler over the years, including in a 2022 interview with Tucker Carlson that Fox News edited to avoid sharing his antisemitic comments. But it’s interesting to see him now specifically going after Portnoy in this kind of video.
As noted there by West, he and Portnoy were indeed tweeting back and forth Saturday. Most of West’s posts there have been deleted (only three total posts remain on his X account as of Sunday afternoon). Portnoy’s posts on the matter, which also include reposting a post claiming West sold posting rights to his X account, remain up. They can be seen below (language warning):
There is 0.0 shot Heil Kanye is running his account. It the scammers planning the rug
But if you can send @kanyewest a message tell him me and Taylor said to go fuck himself.
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) February 23, 2025
Actually smart move by Kanye. Get his money and let the con artists do the dirty work https://t.co/QUH8ZRTFS2
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) February 23, 2025
Sounds just like Kanye.
For the record I have the flu and already took NyQuil before fake Kanye starting tweeting at me so I’m about to fall asleep. https://t.co/9uZsnuwUkB
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) February 23, 2025
I thought Adam Sandler cured him of being a Nazi. Either way I fucking hate this guy so much I don’t even care he appears to have been taken hostage. https://t.co/OYsC6TrXLk
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) February 23, 2025
This is just the latest development in Portnoy’s forays into the cryptocurrency world. As Ankish Jain wrote at Crypto.news this week, Portnoy appears to have been very successful with various memecoin investments and other moves, even when that’s sometimes involved buying a different coin than he planned to. So his comments here about West’s plans were far from his only venture into this space. But it’s notable to see this level of pushback from West, especially in a video (which makes it clear it is him, significant after Portnoy’s accusations it wasn’t West posting on X). And West made the story wilder still by doing this while wearing a swastika shirt.
Another interesting element here is how this adds to a recent run of public Barstool drama with big names. That’s been particularly seen with Patrick and Brittany Mahomes, but also with Braxton Berrios, and with some ex-Barstool talents like Grace O’Malley and Dan Rapaport.
Granted, Portnoy and his company haven’t been particularly shy about public drama. They even got into it very publicly with Roger Goodell and the NFL at points (with Portnoy even holding a “Goodell is Hitler” sign at a Republican National Convention protest in 2016). But the high-profile public exchanges certainly seemed to diminish at least somewhat during the 2020–2023 era where Barstool featured significant ownership (with the ownership percentage changing over that span) from Penn Entertainment, with gambling regulator issues likely part of that.
With Barstool again fully held by Portnoy, it feels like there have been again more of these big public fights featuring him and others from Barstool against various high-profile people. And they’re not just on personal social media accounts; Portnoy’s often also used Barstool platforms like The Unnamed Show to air his grievances. West is the latest addition to the Portnoy feuds collection, and we’ll see if this particular fight has any further developments.
