Kylie Jenner recently adorned the cover of Forbes with the tagline, “At 21, she’s set to be the youngest-ever self-made billionaire.” While her net worth is estimated at $900 million and climbing, the story purported it was mostly due to her successful makeup line “Kylie Cosmetics.”
No one contests that Jenner is wealthy or owns her own makeup line or even that it was all her original idea – but to say she’s a self-made near-billionaire is disingenuous at best and does a disservice to actual self-made entrepreneurs.
Forbes reported:
Don’t get me wrong: Jenner deserves a lot of credit. She could have wasted the money she had access to, or spent it frivolously. Instead, it does appear she had ideas and goals about a specific industry she wanted to delve into and a product she wanted to sell – even if she was the best asset with which to sell it. Herein lies the rub: Jenner couldn’t have launched any product, let alone started a product from scratch without funds. Jenner “used some $250,000 of her earnings from modeling gigs to pay an outside company to produce the first 15,000 lip kit” – but she would not have had modeling gigs were it not for the “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” show which has been running for more than half of her life.
“Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” wherein the lives of the sisters and their ambitious mother are chronicled – famous for being famous and getting wealthy for being famous for that image – has garnered millions of viewers and early contracts that would make a professional sports player jealous. Sure, some people say, “Not everyone could do what they do, living their life on a television show” – but what is it that they’re doing?
To imply that Jenner is self-made when she launched a product people bought because they had seen her every week on a reality show for 10 years is a slap in the face to the rest of America’s entrepreneurs who truly do start from scratch, and who make something of themselves, by themselves, and because their product is truly unique and essential.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
