The world’s youngest billionaire?

Elon Musk may object to being called a billionaire, but it’s not a label that seems to bother Kylie Jenner. At 20, she is the youngest member of the Kardashian-jenner TV family – she first appeared on Keeping Up

with the Kardashians aged ten – but she’s also the richest, said Rupert Neate in The Guardian. She is already thought to be worth $900m, thanks to her make-up company, Kylie Cosmetics. (Her sister Kim Kardashian West is worth $350m, by contrast.) Forbes magazine thinks she’ll be worth a billion dollars by the time she’s 22, a year younger than Mark Zuckerberg when he joined the billionaire club. It would make her the youngest self-made billionaire of all time.

Kylie is a tycoon for “the era of extreme fame leverage”, said Natalie Robehmed in Forbes. To make her money, she pouts for selfies (she is as famous for her “full lips” as Kim is for her “booty”), and posts them almost hourly on Instagram and Snapchat, with captions about which Kylie Cosmetics products she’s wearing. She has more than 110 million followers on Instagram alone. Her company took off in 2015, when she launched a $29 “lip kit”, after months of “teasing” the product on Instagram. The kits sold out in less than a minute. Since then she has sold more than $630m’s worth of make-up. Yet her operation is “ultralight”: it consists of her “momager”, Kris (who takes a 10% cut), and 12 staff. Production of the cosmetics and everything else is outsourced.

Forbes’s description of Jenner as a “self-made” billionaire has provoked scorn, said Ben Chu in The Independent. Does someone born into a reality TV dynasty really qualify as self-made (presuming that isn’t a reference to all the plastic surgery she is alleged to have had)? But there’s no doubting the power of such “social media influencers”; Forbes’s estimate of her wealth is, if anything, on the conservative side. “What such trends say about the state of our society is, of course, another matter.” It’s interesting how often women who do become wealthy are “dismissed as unworthy or trashy”, said Elizabeth Day in The Daily Telegraph. Jenner didn’t inherit a cosmetics company; she built it up herself. But perhaps we think it’s only men “who deserve to be rich”.