Kim Kardashian West is officially a billionaire
With KKW Beauty and Skims, Kim Kardashian's wealth rises to a billion dollars, earning her a spot on the Forbes list.
When Kim Kardashian West was first mentioned on the Forbes pages in 2011, it was simply a tally of her Twitter followers: 6.6 million, just below Barack Obama and just ahead of Ashton Kutcher. Five years later, she was featured on the cover of the magazine thanks to her booming mobile game of hers, which helped her earn $ 51 million that year. She now, she officially joins the list of billionaires (entrepreneurs with fortunes over a billion dollars) in the world for the first time.
Forbes estimates Kardashian West is now worth $ 1 billion, up from $ 780 million in October, thanks to two lucrative businesses, KKW Beauty and Skims, as well as cash from reality shows and endorsement deals, and a number of smaller investments.
Kardashian West founded KKW Beauty in 2017, following the success of her half-sister Kylie Jenner's Kylie Cosmetics. She borrowed from Kylie's playbook, using a similar direct-to-consumer model that relies heavily on social media marketing. Her first release, 300,000 contour kits, sold out in two hours.
By 2018, the business had expanded into eyeshadows, concealers, lipsticks, and fragrances, and it was generating around $ 100 million in revenue.
"This is the first time that I have stopped having licensing agreements and become an owner," Kardashian West told Forbes in 2017, when she announced her cosmetics line.
She capitalized on that property last year when she sold 20% of KKW Beauty to cosmetics conglomerate Coty for $ 200 million, a deal that valued the company at $ 1 billion. While Forbes estimates the figure to be a bit inflated (Coty, which also bought 51% of Kylie Cosmetics in 2020, is known for overpaying), its remaining 72% stake is still worth around $ 500 million, according to our count.
Then there's Skims, the line of shapewear that Kardashian West launched in 2019. It raised money from fashion connoisseurs like Net-a-Porter's Natalie Massane and Theory's Andrew Rosen, and leveraged its massive social media followers to criticize the brand. (He now has 69.6 million followers on Twitter and 213 million followers on Instagram.) Skims has been fast: During the pandemic, when consumers became more interested in comfortable clothes for the sofa than in smoothing their stomachs under evening dresses, they quickly began to focus on clothes from home.
Kim Kardashian West owns a majority stake in Skims, which has not disclosed her earnings. A source familiar with Skims told Forbes about a transaction that values the company above $ 500 million. As a result, Forbes estimates that his stake in Skims is valued conservatively at $ 225 million, enough to raise his fortune to $ 1 billion.
The rest of Kim Kardashian West's fortune is in cash and investments, including real estate. Every year since 2012, he's made at least $ 10 million before taxes, according to Forbes' tally, thanks to paychecks from the Keeping Up With the Kardashians program, endorsement deals, and efforts like the aforementioned mobile game. previously and his now-defunct Kimoji app. She also has three properties in Calabasas, northwest of Los Angeles, and a first-rate investment portfolio, including Disney, Amazon, Netflix and Adidas stocks that her future ex-husband Kanye West gave her for Christmas in 2017.
But it is the companies that she has launched herself and that she has grown up with in the typical Kardashian style of self-promotion that put her on the list of billionaires in the world. So as she herself tweeted the day she appeared on the cover of Forbes, poking fun at the criticism she has received for years: "Not bad for a girl without talent."
