Kanye West's Companies Have 813 Trademark Filings. Only 47 Are Still Alive.

What the USPTO register shows about 24 celebrity trademark portfolios: who is building brands, who is burning through filings, and who is running a tight operation.

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I built GleanMark to make trademark data accessible, and one of my favorite things to do with it is tell the stories the data reveals. Trademarks are the most underappreciated public record in business. They often reveal strategy, failure, ambition, and ego months before a press release does.

So I pulled the USPTO filing records for 24 of the best-known celebrity brand owners, tracked every application to its current status, and ranked them.

The results genuinely surprised me.

A Note on Methodology

For each celebrity, I searched our copy of the USPTO register for the companies and personal-name filings that own their brands, and confirmed each one by the marks it holds: the TAYLOR SWIFT marks for TAS Rights Management, the IVY PARK marks for Parkwood Athletic, the DREW HOUSE marks for Justin Bieber's NSN Apparel, and so on. The counts cover every application and registration whose current owner of record is one of those names, live or dead. "Dead" means an application that was abandoned or a registration that was cancelled or expired. This dataset is almost certainly incomplete. Some celebrities file under companies I haven't tied to them, and filings outside the U.S. (through the Madrid Protocol or foreign offices) are not included. If you spot a missing entity, I want to hear about it.

The Scoreboard

Let's talk about what this actually means.

The Kanye Problem

Eight hundred and thirteen trademark filings. Forty-seven still alive. 94% dead.

The count overstates the number of ideas. Every one of those filings covers a single class, and the same names come back again and again: the 813 filings use just 76 distinct names, plus 56 logo-only filings. Even so, each one was a separate application with its own USPTO fee and its own deadlines.

It's tempting to blame the end of his Adidas partnership in October 2022. The register doesn't show a single cliff there. Going by the date of each filing's last status change, 32 of the dead filings went dead in 2022 and 14 in 2023. Then 210 went dead in 2024 and 135 in 2025.

The filing entities tell their own story. Kanye's marks sit in three companies (Ox Paha Inc., Mascotte Holdings, Inc and Yeezy LLC), and the sheer volume suggests a creative mind that treats trademark applications like sketches: throw everything at the wall, see what resonates, move on. There's a version of this that's defensible as a portfolio strategy. File broadly, let the market decide, abandon what doesn't work. Venture capitalists expect most of their bets to fail, too.

But VCs don't pay maintenance fees on their failures. Trademarks require active upkeep. A registration needs a Section 8 declaration of use between its fifth and sixth anniversaries, with a six-month grace period after that for an extra fee. Miss both and the registration is cancelled (15 U.S.C. § 1058). A portfolio this size needs attorneys, paralegals, and a docketing system just to track the deadlines. Whether these filings died by choice or by neglect, the register can't say. It only shows that almost none of them survived.

Kim Kardashian's portfolio tells a related story: 196 filings, 83% dead. Part of it is filed under the unforgettable entity name KIMSAPRINCESS, INC., which is still the owner of record on 7 live registrations. Between Kanye and Kim, the former couple accounts for 928 dead filings. That's 45% of all the dead filings in this 24-person dataset, from two people.

The Efficiency Leaderboard (Where It Gets Interesting)

The media covers celebrity brand launches. The fragrance drop. The tequila line. The skincare brand. Nobody covers maintenance, which is where real brand value lives. A trademark that dies is a product that failed, a licensing deal that collapsed, a name that was never used, or a deadline someone missed.

So forget who files the most. The real question is: who converts filings into living, maintained brands?

By that metric, the leaderboard flips completely:

Selena Gomez: 44 filings, 39 live, 11% dead. Lean, focused, built entirely around RARE BEAUTY, LLC. This is what a single-brand celebrity strategy looks like when it's executed well.

Bad Bunny: 40 filings, 34 live, 15% dead. Here's something that jumped out at me: Bad Bunny files under his personal legal name, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, which appears on the register in four different spellings. No LLC. No holding company. He isn't alone (Paris Hilton, Post Malone, Howard Stern, and Joe Rogan file under their own names too), but apart from Joe Rogan's three filings, his is the healthiest of them. Most of the big operators in this table use companies instead, which can make a brand easier to license or sell on its own.

MrBeast: 102 filings, 80 live, 22% dead. The largest portfolio in the efficient group, split across BEAST HOLDINGS, LLC and FEASTABLES INC. MrBeast is building a consumer products business around Feastables chocolate, and the trademark data shows a digital-native operation that files with precision. At 102 filings, this isn't a small sample. It's a genuinely well-managed portfolio at meaningful scale.

Billie Eilish: 41 filings, 31 live, 24% dead. Filed through LASH MUSIC, LLC, which also holds the marks for her BLOHSH merchandise line.

And the cautionary footnote: Snoop Dogg. His company, DR ETC HOLDCO LLC, looks tight on its own: 58 filings, 47 live. But the 32 filings under his own name, Calvin Broadus, are all dead, which brings his total to 48%.

There's a generational pattern here that I think is real: newer celebrity brands (Selena Gomez, Bad Bunny, MrBeast, Billie Eilish) cluster at the efficient end of the spectrum. Legacy portfolios (Oprah at 78%, Jay-Z at 58%) carry decades of accumulated dead weight.

An important caveat: portfolio age is doing a lot of the work here. Oprah's company holds filings going back to 1989. MrBeast's go back to 2019. Older portfolios naturally accumulate more dead marks: brands that served their purpose and were retired, products that ran their lifecycle, partnerships that ended. Comparing their dead shares without acknowledging that Oprah's portfolio has 30 more years of history isn't apples to apples.

That said, I don't think age explains all of it. My hypothesis: the current generation of celebrity brand builders also learned from watching the previous generation's waste. They file tighter, maintain better, and treat trademarks as operational commitments rather than aspirational placeholders.

One more caveat: smaller portfolios are inherently easier to maintain. Travis Scott's 0% sounds perfect until you see he has 17 filings. That's not a strategy; it's a sample size. Selena Gomez's 39 out of 44, though, is a track record.

Taylor Swift at Scale

Taylor Swift occupies a unique position in this data: she's operating at massive scale (348 filings, tied with Kylie Jenner for second place) while keeping more than half of them alive. All 178 live filings sit in TAS Rights Management, LLC, which is functionally a mid-size IP holding company. The 36 filings in her own name, filed between 2007 and 2014, are all dead.

The maintenance costs alone tell you something about the seriousness of the operation. Her 165 live registrations cover 349 classes. Every 10 years, each class needs a Section 8 declaration and a renewal, $325 each in USPTO fees, so one round of renewals for those 349 classes costs $226,850 before attorney time. That's a line item in an operating budget. That's a department.

TAS Rights Management has also filed oppositions and a cancellation petition at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board against other people's marks: active portfolio defense, not just passive registration. A mark nobody polices can weaken over time. The fact that TAS is playing offense at the TTAB tells you there's a professional IP team running this, not a business manager who files trademarks when someone remembers to.

Kylie Jenner's company has exactly as many filings, 348, but a different survival rate: 61% are dead. The portfolios differ under the hood, too. Kylie's most common classes are retail services (Class 35) and cosmetics (Class 3). Swift's lead with entertainment services (Class 41), recorded music and other Class 9 goods, and clothing (Class 25).

The Hidden Architecture: Why Entity Names Matter

The most revealing column in that table isn't filings or dead share. It's the entity name.

Rihanna's marks run through three companies: RORAJ TRADE LLC holds the FENTY and RIRI marks, while FENTY BEAUTY LLC and FENTY SKIN LLC each hold their own product names. Separate companies for separate brands keep each brand's marks in their own box, which can make a single brand easier to license, finance, or sell.

Beyoncé runs a similar structure: BGK TRADEMARK HOLDINGS holds personal-brand marks like BEY GOOD and RUMI CARTER, while PARKWOOD ATHLETIC holds the IVY PARK marks.

Dwayne Johnson splits his brands the same way: SIETE BUCKS SPIRITS holds TEREMANA, his tequila, and ZOA ENERGY holds ZOA, the energy drink. Each brand sits in its own company, the structure a large consumer-products company would use.

Then there are the celebrities who file in their own names: Bad Bunny, Post Malone (as Austin Richard Post), Paris Hilton, Howard Stern, and Joe Rogan. For anyone building a brand, who owns the mark is one of the first structural decisions you make, and the celebrity data is a live case study in the full range of approaches.

One more entity name worth noting: Ryan Reynolds files under MAXIMUM EFFORT IP HOLDINGS, LLC. Six filings, five live, 17% dead. The man even brands his holding companies.

What This Data Doesn't Tell You (And Why That Matters)

I want to be transparent about the limits of this analysis.

Dead isn't always failure. Some marks are filed as defensive placeholders and abandoned once the threat passes. Some are replaced by updated filings with new logos or revised goods descriptions: the brand didn't die, the registration evolved. Some marks served their purpose during a product cycle and were retired on schedule.

Filing counts also depend on how a company files. Every one of Kanye's 813 filings covers a single class, while Taylor Swift's 348 cover 649 classes. A raw count overstates one and understates the other.

This analysis also doesn't capture filings outside the U.S. A celebrity with a modest U.S. portfolio might have a much larger global one.

And as I noted above, portfolio age distorts everything. The efficiency leaderboard favors younger portfolios, and I've tried to account for that, but it's a real limitation.

What the data does tell you, unambiguously, is who's filing in the U.S., how much, under what structures, and what's surviving.

The Cost of Playing This Game

Let's talk money, because the numbers are real and they're bigger than people think.

Filing an application costs $350 per class in USPTO fees, more if the description of goods isn't taken from the USPTO's ID Manual or runs long. An intent-to-use application adds $150 per class for the statement of use once the brand is actually in use. The Section 8 declaration between years five and six is $325 per class. Between years nine and ten, the owner files both a Section 8 declaration and a renewal, $325 per class each. So the first 10 years of a single registration in a single class cost $1,325 in government fees alone, or $1,475 if it started as an intent-to-use application.

Taylor Swift's renewals, as above: $226,850 per round for 349 classes. Kylie Jenner's 44 live registrations cover 46 classes: $29,900 per round. And none of this includes attorney fees for prosecution, office action responses, TTAB proceedings, or filings abroad.

Kanye's 813 single-class filings, at today's fee of $350 per class, would cost $284,550 just to file, for a portfolio that is now 94% dead. The fee schedule has changed over the years, but the point stands. That's the cost of treating the trademark system as a brainstorming tool.

What Comes Next

I'm going to keep writing about what trademark data reveals: stories about brands, businesses, and strategy that you can't get from press releases or earnings calls. Trademarks are often filed months before products launch, and they often die before a failure is acknowledged. They reveal corporate structures, partnership dynamics, and product roadmaps in public filings that anyone can access but almost nobody analyzes.

Celebrity portfolios are a compelling starting point because the names are recognizable and the patterns are dramatic. But the same approach works for any company. What does a sudden burst of dead filings signal about a strategic pivot? What does the entity structure behind a hot startup's trademark portfolio reveal about its plans? I took the same approach to Mattel's 1,500 trademarks.

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Howard Katzenberg is the founder of GleanMark, a trademark intelligence platform built to make USPTO data accessible. All data in this article comes from GleanMark's daily copy of the USPTO trademark register, as of October 2026. Updated October 2026: counts refreshed from the current register, and every filing entity re-checked against the marks it owns. That added personal-name filings for several celebrities, added and removed some companies, and dropped one celebrity whose listed company turned out to be unrelated. If you believe an entity is missing from this analysis, contact us.