If you haven’t lived under a rock for the past decade, you would most likely have heard of the Kardashian/Jenner name. The youngest of the notoriously influential family, Kylie Jenner, proves that leveraging the biggest celebrity birthright in the world with a natural proclivity for marketing and taste-making can lead to incomprehensible wealth at an even more surprising age.
Although the claim was later retracted, Jenner was famously named “The World’s Youngest Self-Made Billionaire” by Forbes at only 21. At the time, she was the youngest billionaire in the world—younger than both Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Spiegel, who were also self-made billionaires in their early twenties. While Forbes later stated that the estimate was off by just over $100 million (due to false reporting on the Kardashian-Jenner clan’s end), it is still a remarkable achievement. The Forbes article’s title was also incendiary in its use of the term ‘self-made,’ as it is arguable whether Jenner’s success would have been achieved if she did not have the support of her family. Despite this, at that time Kylie Jenner managed to earn more than all of her famously successful relatives, including sister Kim Kardashian West and brother-in-law Kanye West.
Kylie Jenner’s natural talent for marketing and image making came from her early exposure to fame and being on reality TV from the age of 9. As the youngest of the most famous family on reality TV, she had big footsteps to follow and benefited from watching her siblings take charge of their own lives. Jenner was reportedly cut off from parental support at 15, instead earning income from her appearance on the show, her own spin-off show, a clothing line she launched with sister Kendall at 15, modeling contracts, and endorsement deals with big brands. Despite being bullied in school for her fame and developing insecurities about how she would fail in comparison to her successful siblings, she managed to move forward under the guidance of her marketing manager and mother, Kris Jenner.
After creating headlines for the enhancement of her lips, Kylie Jenner demonstrated her family’s ability to spin scandal into money by launching her version of lip kits. This allowed her to tap into her passion for makeup, an art form she learned to empower herself with in her youth. Since launching Lip Kits under her brand Kylie Beauty, Jenner expanded her business beyond its online channel to a highly lucrative distribution partnership with Ulta (which earned a reported $300 million in revenue) and a subsequent sale of a majority stake of her company to Coty Inc. for $600 million, which gave her company a $1.2 billion valuation.
To date, the bulk of Jenner’s income comes from her remarkably profitable startup Kylie Cosmetics, which has benefited from low overheads and high turnover largely thanks to her ability to directly market to her audience of 267 million actively engaged followers. While she has sold the majority of the company, she is still developing future product lines such as a much-anticipated swimwear line that she has been heavily teasing over the past few months. Regardless of what she does next, it is certain that the 23-year-old has further billions to come, and the world will be watching it all with much intrigue.