Kylie Jenner has officially surpassed Mark Zuckerberg to become the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. At just 21 years old, Jenner has surged her net worth all the way to billionaire status.
According to Forbes, Jenner was worth just $5 million back in 2015, but the monumental success of her brand — Kylie Cosmetics — has catapulted the Kardashian star into the billionaire threshold. Her exclusive deal with Ulta, combined with her social media promotion has led to huge financial growth each year. She owns the entire company and only has 7 other full time employees. Kris Jenner, the matriarch of all of this, handles PR for the company while collecting a ten percent fee.
There is obvious controversy on social media surrounding the term “self-made billionaire.” Jenner comes from an extremely privileged family and already had a built in platform for easy success. Unlike Zuckerberg who started his company from scratch inside his Harvard dorm room, Jenner had financial freedom to fail or succeed on her own without any risk or repercussions.
The accomplishment is still pretty crazy, becoming a billionaire that quickly isn’t an easy task. However, the term “self-made” should probably be amended in Jenner’s case because she didn’t face any difficulties in funding the business and her name recognition alone defiantly helped secure her lucrative deal with Ulta. The main thing that is impressive is her social media prowess. She effectively used her followers as the only form of promotion for her products; an impressive innovation for replacing standard advertising.
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