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Musician Kanye West was interviewed by Zane Lowe.
- Radio host Zane Lowe interviewed singer Kanye West on Apple Music.
- West called Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey his favorite founder, and said Dorsey offered to invest in him early on.
- He had less flattering things to say about Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who he famously asked to invest $1 billion into his ideas.
- West called social media apps like Instagram "modern-day cigarettes," and said his meetings and conversations with Mark Zuckerberg were "completely different" than his talks with Dorsey.
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Kanye West revealed that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is his favorite founder in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music released Thursday. He called Dorsey "just incredibly smart, a visionary." He went on to praise Dorsey's history as a founder, noting Twitter and Square.
"Jack Dorsey has created an app where someone can buy into that stock at a dollar," West said, referring to Dorsey's payment service Square testing out a stock-trading service in its Cash App that would allow people to buy shares in holding companies like Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.
Kanye also said Dorsey was one of the first people who wanted to invest in him.
He talked about the different visions between founders and investors, and his respect for founders. "You've gotta honor living founders, those are the great great great great grandfathers of what's being built." Twitter declined to comment.
Lowe asked which founders he was speaking to. "All of them. Give me a call," he responded. He said "every founder on the planet" will have to look him in the eye, when he's president of the US. "I will forgive, but I will remember, any founder that didn't have the capacity to understand culturally what we were doing."
On the topic of founders, West appears to not be a big fan of Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO he famously asked to invest $1 billion into his ideas.
"I will always remember every meeting and interaction I've had with Jack Dorsey, and I will always remember my meetings and interactions with Mark Zuckerberg - and they've been completely different," he said.
Kanye then said people are addicted and brainwashed by social media apps like Instagram. "It's modern-day cigarettes," he said, echoing a favorite line of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who has called Facebook the "new cigarettes." A spokesperson for Facebook was not immediately available to comment.
West revealed in the interview he's struggled with sex addiction for decades, and said apps like Instagram made him "struggle." He likened photos on Instagram to what pornography was like for him growing up.
Dorsey has had his own digs at Zuckerberg recently, including at a Twitter News Summit yesterday when he called Zuckerberg's attempt to rewrite Facebook's founding as a response to the Iraq War "revisionist history."
Finally, Kanye emphasized that he no longer considers himself an entertainer, but rather a "Christian innovator," and announced he's been working on a music-related device with Swedish music-technology company Teenage Engineering.