According to Forbes Travis Scott’s girlfriend Kylie Jenner has become the world’s youngest 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 billionaire fortune club by Forbes. Forbes ranked Jenner as the world’s 2,057th richest person. She became a billionaire two years younger than the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who took the title at the age of 23 in 2008.
“I didn’t expect anything. I did not foresee the future,” Jenner said in an interview with Forbes. “But [the recognition] feels really good. That’s a nice pat on the back.”
Jenner’s fortune comes from Kylie Cosmetics, the makeup company she runs largely from her iPhone, with the help of her mother Kris. Forbes estimated that the cosmetics company, which is 100%-owned by Jenner, made $360 million 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 the Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos with a $131 billion.
Most of Kylie Cosmetics’ 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 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 “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
Orders and sales are outsourced to Shopify, a Canadian online company that also runs shops for Drake and Justin Bieber.
Jenner also does not have to worry much about the business’s finances or the day-to-day management of her 12 staff (including five part-time). Those matters are outsourced to her mom or “momager” Kris Jenner, who manages all her children’s financial operations – in return for a 10% cut.
Jenner, who used her reality TV exposure to secure modelling work with brands such as Topshop, said she had struggled to decide what to do with her life. Then her thoughts turned to her most talked about feature: her lips.
She trademarked the phrase “Kylie Lip Kits … for the perfect pout” two years before setting up her company with $250,000 of money she had made through modelling and reality TV work.
“Ever since I was probably 15 I’ve been obsessed with lipstick. I could never find a lip liner and a lipstick that were the perfect match. So that’s where I thought of the idea that I wanted to create my own product,” Jenner said.
Jenner said she was scared that sales might not take off when the website first launched. “I kept calling my mom, saying: ‘Mom, I’m so scared. Do you think it’s going to sell?’ Because I put all my money upfront. You know, it’s all my money. I put everything into this.”
At 21, Kylie Jenner becomes the youngest self-made billionaire ever https://t.co/PTLYwKp69b #ForbesBillionaires pic.twitter.com/K3NwZTmyWS
— Forbes (@Forbes) March 5, 2019
