How Kylie Jenner became the world’s youngest billionaire

The business magazine ranked Jenner as the world’s 2,057th richest person, and crowned her the “youngest ever billionaire in the world”. She becomes a billionaire two years younger than Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg who took the title at the age of 23.

“I didn’t expect anything. I did not foresee the future,” Jenner said in an interview with Forbes to celebrate her good fortune. “But [the recognition] feels really good. That’s a nice pat on the back.”

Jenner’s fortune comes from Kylie Cosmetics, the make-up company she runs largely from her black iPhone X, with the help of her mother Kris. Forbes estimated that the cosmetics company, which is 100 per cent-owned by Jenner, made $360 million (Dh1.3 billion) in sales last year.

Forbes’ estimate of Jenner’s wealth comes in its annual ranking of the world’s billionaires. Its research found that the total number of billionaires had declined over the past year from 2,208 to 2,153. The world’s richest person remains Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos with a $131 billion fortune, up $19 billion on 2018.

Nearly all of Kylie Cosmetic’s sales come directly from Jenner’s social media accounts. She has 128 million followers on Instagram (three-quarters of whom are estimated to be aged 18-24). She has one of the most viewed accounts on Snapchat, and is followed by 26.7 million on Twitter. Such is the weight of her influence that when she tweeted that she was “sooo over” Snapchat last year, more than $1 billion was wiped off the company’s stock market value.

Sales are driven higher by Jenner sparking fomo (fear of missing out) among her fans with warnings that collections are in very limited quantities. Her initial stock of $29 “lip kits” — matching lipstick and lip liner — sold out in less than a minute, crashing the website.

Jenner, who has been in the public eye since she made her debut on ‘Keeping Up With The Kardashians’ a decade ago when she was 10, said: “Social media is an amazing platform. I have such easy access to my fans and my customers.”

The business, which Jenner founded in 2015, employs just seven full-time staff. It is almost totally outsourced. Jenner comes up with ideas for styles, but the products are made by Seed Beauty, a private-label producer which also produces makeup for KKW Beauty, run by Jenner’s half-sister Kim Kardashian West. More than 500 people at Seed Beauty, which owns make-up production company Spatz Laboratories, work on the Jenner-Kardashian brands.

Jenner does not directly sell her products either. Kylie Cosmetics’ orders and sales are outsourced to Shopify, a Canadian online company that also runs shops for Drake and Justin Bieber. Shopify promotes its success with Jenner to encourage other entrepreneurs to skip the boring things like fulfilling orders and logistics by using their services.

“The reigning Queen of Snapchat. Reality TV darling. Make-up mogul. She’s more than just a famous face — the youngest of the Kardashian clan, Kylie Jenner, has hustled beyond her 19 years, monetising her name and exploding it into a massive cosmetics brand,” Shopify says on its site. “Kylie Cosmetics entered the IRL [in real life] space for the first time ever, driving lip envy to a fever pitch.”

Jenner also does not have to worry much about the business’s finances or the day-to-day management of her 12 staff (seven full-time, five part-time). Those matters are outsourced to her mom or “momager” Kris Jenner, who manages all her children’s financial operations — in return for a 10 per cent cut.

Jenner, who used her reality TV exposure to secure modelling work with brands like Topshop, said she had struggled to decide what to do with her life. Then her thoughts turned to her most talked about feature: her lips.

Jenner trademarked the phrase “Kylie Lip Kits ... for the perfect pout” two years before setting up her company with $250,000 of money she had made through modelling and reality TV work.

The total combined wealth of the world’s billionaires is $8.7 trillion — more than three times the gross domestic product (GDP) of the UK — down from $9.1 trillion last year.

Forbes calculated that Bezos’s fortune, which is mostly held in Amazon shares, increased by $19 billion over the past year due mostly to the increase in the online giant’s share price. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft took second-place, with a $96.5 billion fortune, up from $90 billion last year. Warren Buffett is the third-richest with $82.5 billion, followed by France’s richest man Bernard Arnault, who has an estimated $76 billion fortune.

Donald Trump’s ‘net worth’ is unchanged at $3.1 billion, but the US President rises from the 766th to the 715th richest person on earth as other billionaires have seen their fortunes fall.