Kim Kardashian breaks into the Forbes billionaire's list

Kim Kardashian, as estimated and announced by Forbes on Tuesday, has broken into the billionaire’s list. Joining the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, Kardashian now occupies the 2,674th spot on the list.

That’s a lot of money for someone who people say has no talent. Forbes attributes this money to her two lucrative businesses — KKW beauty and Skims — earnings from her reality TV show Keeping up with the Kardashians, endorsement deals and other smaller investments.

Still trying to fathom how Kardashian got here? Well, surprise, surprise, Keeping up with the Kardashians played a role, with the show earning her at least $10 million in pre-tax revenue a year since 2012.

After her half-sister Kylie Jenner’s success in the make-up business, she acted fast in establishing her own, KKW Beauty, in 2017. The 300,000 contour kits she launched initially sold out within two hours. Forbes estimates that within its first year of business, the company recorded an astonishing $100 million in revenue. Since then, the company has expanded to include products like eyeshadows, lipsticks, concealers and fragrances.

In 2020, she sold 20% stake of her company to cosmetics conglomerate Coty for $200 million, in a deal that valued it at an exorbitant $1 billion. Observers noted that this valuation was highly inflated. Moving on, according to Forbes’ current estimates, Kardashian’s remaining stake at KKW Beauty is still worth about $500 million.

Her shapewear and bodysuit company Skims is the other immensely lucrative revenue stream she has to her name. During the pandemic, seeing a new market emerge as everyone remained quarantined at home, the company was quick to launch a line of loungewear. This proved to be a timely and profitable decision. While the company is yet to publish its sheets, Forbes estimates her stake in the company at a ‘conservative’ $225 million, ‘enough to lift her fortune to $1 billion’.

In addition, Kardashian is said to have investments in real state and a blue-chip stock portfolio (featuring shares in Amazon, Disney, Adidas and Netflix) that was gifted to her by outspoken soon-to-be ex-husband Kanye West. She also partook in technological business endeavors, releasing a mobile game, and her discontinued Kimoji app. What will she get out of her high-profile divorce with a man worth $6.6 billion? We’ll find out soon enough.

She has yet to comment on the announcement of her inclusion in the list.

Kardashian’s not the first representative of the Kardashian-Jenner family on the list, and comes in after Kylie Jenner, the original cosmetic entrepreneur in the family, was announced a ‘self-made’ billionaire in March 2019 by Forbes. The magazine received great criticism for calling her ‘self-made’, given that she was born into a wealthy, influential and well-known family. In fact, in the year after that, the magazine put her out of the list, saying her previous valuation was inflated, and that she was not a billionaire. She is now reported to stand at a net worth of $700 million.