Kylie Jenner, the youngest member of the Kardashian-Jenner American reality TV family, has become the youngest ever billionaire at the age of just 21.
Jenner, who grew up under the watch of TV cameras filming Keeping Up with the Kardashians, was on Tuesday admitted to the “nine-zero” fortune club by Forbes. The business magazine ranked Jenner as the world’s 2,057th richest person, and crowned her the “youngest ever billionaire in the world”.
She becomes a billionaire two years younger than Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg who took the title at the age of 23.
“I didn’t expect anything. I did not foresee the future,” Jenner said in an interview with Forbes to celebrate her good fortune. “But [the recognition] feels really good. That’s a nice pat on the back.”
i can’t wait to launch a new product for @kyliecosmetics 😝 can you guess what it is? ✨ pic.twitter.com/guSSeq4QGr
— Kylie Jenner (@KylieJenner) February 16, 2019
Jenner’s fortune comes from Kylie Cosmetics, the makeup company she runs largely from her black iPhone X, with the help of her mother Kris. Forbes estimated that the cosmetics company, which is 100%-owned by Jenner, made $360m (£274m) in sales last year.
Forbes’s estimate of Jenner’s wealth comes in its annual ranking of the world’s billionaires. Its research found that the total number of billionaires had declined over the past year from 2,208 to 2,153.
The world’s richest person remains Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos with a $131bn (£99bn) fortune, up $19bn (£15bn) on 2018.
Nearly all of Kylie Cosmetic’s sales come directly from Jenner’s social media accounts. She has 128 million followers on Instagram (three-quarters of whom are estimated to be aged 18-24). She has one of the most viewed accounts on Snapchat, and is followed by 26.7 million on Twitter. Such is the weight of her influence that when she tweeted that she was “sooo over” Snapchat last year, more than $1bn (£762m) was wiped off the company’s stock market value.
Sales are driven higher by Jenner sparking fomo (fear of missing out) among her fans with warnings that collections are in very limited quantities. Her initial stock of $29 (£22)“lip kits” – matching lipstick and lip liner – sold out in less than a minute, crashing the website.
Jenner, who has been in the public eye since she made her debut on Keeping Up With The Kardashians a decade ago when she was 10, said: “Social media is an amazing platform. I have such easy access to my fans and my customers.”
The business, which Jenner founded in 2015, employs just seven full-time staff. It is almost totally outsourced. Jenner comes up with ideas for styles, but the products are made by Seed Beauty, a private-label producer which also produces makeup for KKW Beauty, run by Jenner’s half-sister Kim Kardashian West. More than 500 people at Seed Beauty, which owns makeup production company Spatz Laboratories, work on the Jenner-Kardashian brands.
