Kanye West Has Filed 799 Trademarks. Only 46 Are Still Alive.

The first-ever analysis of celebrity trademark portfolios reveals who's building empires, who's burning money, and who's quietly running the tightest brand operation in entertainment.

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I built GleanMark to make trademark data accessible. This is the first article in a series where I use our platform to tell stories the data reveals. Trademarks are the most underappreciated public record in business — they reveal strategy, failure, ambition, and ego months before press releases do.

So I did something nobody's done before: I pulled the complete USPTO filing histories for 25 of the most prominent celebrity brand owners in America, tracked every application through to its current status, and ranked them.

The results genuinely surprised me. And I've been staring at trademark data for years.

A Note on Methodology

I identified filing entities through a combination of assignee searches in the USPTO database, public corporate records, and GleanMark's entity-linking tools. For each celebrity, I searched for known holding companies, personal name filings, and brand-specific entities. This dataset is almost certainly incomplete. Some celebrities may file under entities I haven't linked to them, and international filings (through the Madrid Protocol or foreign offices) are not included. This is a U.S.-only, best-efforts analysis — the most comprehensive one published to date, but not the final word. If you spot a missing entity, I want to hear about it.

The Scoreboard

Rank	Celebrity	Filing Entity	Total Filings	Live Marks	Dead/Abandoned	Abandonment Rate
1	Kanye West	OX PAHA INC. + MASCOTTE HOLDINGS	799	46	753	94%
2	Kylie Jenner	KYLIE JENNER, INC.	333	188	145	44%
3	Taylor Swift	TAS RIGHTS MANAGEMENT, LLC	309	175	134	43%
4	Kim Kardashian	KIMSAPRINCESS, INC. + SKIMS BODY	251	36	215	86%
5	Oprah Winfrey	HARPO, INC.	221	46	175	79%
6	Rihanna	RORAJ TRADE LLC + Fenty Beauty + Fenty Skin	193	86	107	55%
7	Matthew McConaughey	J.K. Livin Brands, Inc.	123	55	68	55%
8	Beyoncé	BGK TRADEMARK HOLDINGS + PARKWOOD ATHLETIC	99	58	41	41%
9	MrBeast	FEASTABLES, INC. + BEAST HOLDINGS	84	72	12	14%
10	Snoop Dogg	DR ETC HOLDCO LLC	52	48	4	8%
11	Bad Bunny	Martínez Ocasio, Benito Antonio	52	45	7	13%
12	Jay-Z	ROC NATION LLC	41	12	29	71%
13	Billie Eilish	LASH MUSIC, LLC	41	33	8	20%
14	Drake	October's Very Own IP Holdings	38	18	20	53%
15	Selena Gomez	RARE BEAUTY, LLC	37	32	5	14%
16	Dwayne Johnson	SIETE BUCKS SPIRITS + ZOA Energy + CALLE TRES	36	20	16	44%
17	Ariana Grande	GrandAri, Inc.	27	20	7	26%
18	Justin Bieber	NSN APPAREL CO., LLC	21	14	7	33%
19	Post Malone	Austin Richard Post	18	12	6	33%
20	Paris Hilton	Paris Hilton	14	6	8	57%
21	Doja Cat	DOJA, LLC	11	4	7	64%
22	Howard Stern	STERN, HOWARD	10	8	2	20%
23	Travis Scott	CACTUS JACK PUBLISHING, LLC	6	6	0	0%
24	Ryan Reynolds	MAXIMUM EFFORT IP HOLDINGS, LLC	6	5	1	17%
25	Joe Rogan	Joe Rogan	3	3	0	0%

Let's talk about what this actually means.

The Kanye Problem

Seven hundred and ninety-nine trademark filings. Forty-six survivors. A 94% abandonment rate.

To put that in context, the overall USPTO abandonment rate hovers around 48%. Kanye's attrition is nearly double that. At a minimum of $350 per class in government fees, those 799 filings represent at least $280,000 paid to the USPTO — and that's before a single billable hour of attorney time. The real cost, including legal counsel for drafting, prosecution, and office action responses, is likely north of a million dollars. For marks that are almost entirely dead.

I want to be fair here. A significant chunk of those abandonments almost certainly traces to the Adidas partnership collapse in late 2022, which would have wiped out an enormous number of YEEZY-related filings in a single catastrophic event. That's not chronic dysfunction — it's a business relationship detonating. Both are interesting stories, but they're different stories.

Still, even accounting for the Adidas fallout, the pattern is striking. Kanye files under two entities — OX PAHA INC. and MASCOTTE HOLDINGS — 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 90% of their bets to fail, too.

But VCs don't pay maintenance fees on their failures. Trademarks require active upkeep. A Section 8 Declaration of Use is due between years five and six, with a six-month grace period after that. Miss the window entirely and the mark dies — no reinstatement. A portfolio of 799 marks requires an infrastructure of attorneys, paralegals, and docketing systems just to track the deadlines. The 94% abandonment rate suggests that infrastructure either didn't exist or couldn't keep pace with the filing velocity.

Kim Kardashian's portfolio tells a related story: 251 filings, 86% abandoned. Filed partly under the unforgettable entity name KIMSAPRINCESS, INC. — a relic of early-career branding that's still the legal owner of record on federal trademark registrations. Between Kanye and Kim, the former couple accounts for 968 dead trademarks. That's 55% of all abandoned marks in this entire 25-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 gets abandoned is a product that failed, a licensing deal that collapsed, 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:

Snoop Dogg: 52 filings, 48 live, 8% abandonment. Nearly perfect. Filing under DR ETC HOLDCO LLC, Snoop has built a portfolio where almost everything sticks. This is the opposite of the Kanye approach — conservative, deliberate, file only what you intend to use and maintain. It's not the biggest portfolio, but it might be the best-run one in entertainment.

Bad Bunny: 52 filings, 45 live, 13% abandonment. Here's something that jumped out at me: Bad Bunny files under his personal legal name — Martínez Ocasio, Benito Antonio. No LLC. No holding company. At his scale, that's unusual and potentially risky. If a trademark dispute escalates to litigation, there's no corporate veil between the mark and the individual. It could be a deliberate choice rooted in simplicity or cultural preference. It could also be something a good IP attorney would flag. Either way, the efficiency is remarkable.

MrBeast: 84 filings, 72 live, 14% abandonment. The largest portfolio in the high-efficiency tier, split across FEASTABLES, INC. and BEAST HOLDINGS. MrBeast is building a consumer products empire — Feastables chocolate, Beast Burger, the whole ecosystem — and the trademark data shows a digital-native operation that files with precision. At 84 filings, this isn't a small sample. It's a genuinely well-managed portfolio at meaningful scale.

Selena Gomez: 37 filings, 32 live, 14% abandonment. Lean, focused, almost entirely built around RARE BEAUTY, LLC. This is what a single-brand celebrity strategy looks like when it's executed well.

There's a generational pattern here that I think is real: newer celebrity brands (MrBeast, Bad Bunny, Selena Gomez, Billie Eilish at 20%) cluster at the efficient end of the spectrum. Legacy portfolios (Oprah at 79%, Jay-Z at 71%) carry decades of accumulated dead weight.

An important caveat: portfolio age is doing a lot of the work here. Oprah has been filing trademarks since the 1980s. MrBeast since roughly 2020. 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 abandonment rates without acknowledging that Oprah has 35 additional years of accumulated dead weight 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% abandonment rate sounds perfect until you see he has six filings. That's not a strategy; it's a sample size. Snoop's 48 out of 52, though — that's a track record.

Taylor Swift at Scale

Taylor Swift occupies a unique position in this data: she's operating at massive scale (309 filings, third-highest in the dataset) while maintaining a 43% abandonment rate that beats the USPTO average. At 175 live marks, TAS Rights Management, LLC is functionally a mid-size IP holding company.

The maintenance costs alone tell you something about the seriousness of the operation. At current government fee rates, keeping 175 marks alive through their 10-year renewal cycles costs roughly $230,000–$300,000 in USPTO fees — before attorney time. That's a line item in an operating budget. That's a department.

TAS Rights Management has also filed oppositions at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board against third-party marks — active portfolio defense, not just passive registration. In trademark law, you either enforce your rights or you risk losing them. 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 numbers are almost eerily similar: 333 filings, 188 live, 44% abandonment. But the portfolios likely look very different under the hood. Kylie's is concentrated in beauty and cosmetics. Swift's almost certainly spans music, merchandise, touring, entertainment, and lifestyle categories. Same efficiency, different architecture.

The Hidden Architecture: Why Entity Names Matter

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

When Rihanna files a trademark, it goes through one of three entities: RORAJ TRADE LLC for her personal brand IP, plus separate entities for Fenty Beauty and Fenty Skin. This isn't administrative randomness — it's liability architecture. If Fenty Skin faces a product liability lawsuit, the legal exposure is contained within that entity. RORAJ TRADE LLC, holding Rihanna's personal brand marks, is shielded.

Beyoncé runs a similar structure: BGK TRADEMARK HOLDINGS for personal brand IP, PARKWOOD ATHLETIC for the Adidas partnership. When that partnership has a defined corporate boundary, either party can exit cleanly. The marks don't get tangled.

Dwayne Johnson takes it furthest: SIETE BUCKS SPIRITS (Teremana tequila), ZOA Energy (the energy drink), and CALLE TRES (additional ventures). Each brand is its own sellable asset. If Johnson wants to exit the energy drink business, he sells the ZOA entity. Teremana doesn't move. His personal brand doesn't move. This is Fortune 500 corporate structuring applied to a celebrity portfolio.

Then there's Bad Bunny, filing everything under his birth name with no entity protection. And Post Malone, filing as Austin Richard Post. And Joe Rogan, filing as Joe Rogan. These are individuals with significant brand value and zero corporate veil between their trademarks and their personal assets. For anyone building a brand: this is the first structural decision you should 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% abandonment. 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.

Abandonment isn't always failure. Some marks are intentionally 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.

I also can't see the class breakdown from this top-level data. A single filing covering five Nice classes represents five distinct product categories, not one. Kanye's 799 filings might represent fewer distinct brand concepts than the number suggests if many were multi-class applications.

This analysis also doesn't capture international filings. Many of these celebrities file heavily through the Madrid Protocol and directly with foreign trademark offices. A celebrity with a modest U.S. portfolio might have an enormous 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. That's never been published before in one place.

The Cost of Playing This Game

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

Filing a single trademark application costs $250–$350 per class in government fees, depending on the filing basis. A Statement of Use filing adds $150 per class. The Section 8 Declaration of Use at year five is $325 per class. The Section 9 Renewal at year ten is another $325 per class. Over a 10-year lifecycle, a single trademark in a single class costs roughly $1,325–$1,725 in government fees alone.

Taylor Swift's 175 live marks: $230,000–$300,000 in government fees per decade. Kylie Jenner's 188 live marks: roughly $250,000–$325,000. Rihanna's 86: $115,000–$150,000. And none of this includes attorney fees for prosecution, office action responses, TTAB proceedings, or international filings.

Kanye's 799 filings, mostly abandoned, represent at least $280,000 in filing fees paid to the USPTO for marks that no longer exist. The legal fees to prepare, file, and (in many cases) respond to office actions on those applications likely pushed the total past seven figures. That's the cost of treating the trademark system as a brainstorming tool.

What Comes Next

I'm going to write a lot more about what trademark data reveals.

This is the first article in an ongoing series — using real-time USPTO data to tell stories about brands, businesses, and strategy that you can't get from press releases or earnings calls. Trademarks are filed months before products launch. They're abandoned months before failures are acknowledged. They reveal corporate structures, partnership dynamics, geographic ambitions, 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 analytical framework applies to every company in America. What does a Fortune 500 company's sudden burst of abandonments signal about a strategic pivot? What does the entity structure behind a hot startup's trademark portfolio reveal about their exit strategy?

Next up: I'm going deep on the goods-and-services classifications behind these portfolios. The top-level numbers tell you how much celebrities are filing. The class data tells you what they're building. That's where the real strategy lives.

Stay tuned.

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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 is sourced from the USPTO's public trademark database via GleanMark's monitoring tools. Data is current as of February 2026. Methodology details are described above; if you believe an entity is missing from this analysis, contact us.