Kylie Jenner is the world’s youngest self-made billionaire for the second year running according to the rich people compilers Forbes, the final word in counting other people’s money. Kylie made the list because, even though she made the billion out of money she already had courtesy of her famous family fortune as a Kardashian, she made it herself, hence self-made. Thanks to the mighty magic of social media influencer-ing, and Kylie herself being the one of the most powerful social media influencers ever — she is virtually a witch on Instagram—Kylie Cosmetics sold enough lipstick and related face-beat paraphernalia to her followers to raise her personal fortune above one billion last year. Mama, I self-made it, was probably a sentence edited out of that episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians. Now 22, she is the youngest on the list again, having sold 51% of Kylie Cosmetics to a larger beauty firm, the sale bringing her net worth up to 1.2 billion dollars. Essentially, she got a goose from the family farm, made it lay golden eggs and then sold half the goose. The news arrived at my office during whiskey break (which is also, naturally, intellect break) and my Finance Research Intern, Fidelis, was scratching his head very hard, even though I keep telling him no touching faces in my meetings, not even the ones on Zoom and Skype. If you want to be confused manifest your confusion by scratching your bum or belly. Those are the rules. Fidelis thinks that without the company that made her a billionaire she should not be a billionaire. “Selling the goose that lays your golden eggs?” “Selling half the goose,” I correct him. “And did you sanitise the screen you are talking to me on? Clean the camera.” “Okay, selling 51% of said goose. How do you sell the goose and still be a golden eggs billionaire? You no longer own the goose.” “Yeah, but you still have the eggs it gave you before the sale. Plus the money you got from selling it,” I simply explain. Slowly Fidelis is beginning to understand. And rapidly I am beginning to understand that I should have been more stringent when hiring researchers. Unfortunately, this meeting was on Zoom so I could not physically reach him to take away his whiskey after that. But I think he should stick to “lite” beer until he can prove he deserves the respect he took for granted. The only other self-made moneybags on the youngest billionaires list are tech guys with self-made systems that we expect to lead young boys and girls to massive wealth in this era of social media and e-commerce. Evan Speigel, 29, the creator of Snapchat, the platform that made Kylie Jenner famous enough to sell makeup to so many faces that she ended up with all those billions, is seventh on the list with 1.9 billion and 29-year-old John Collison, who has a payments app called Stripe that probably just benefitted from all those people sending money to Kylie, is eighth with 3.2 billion. But he’s a banker, so that’s to be expected. He probably got a cut from the sale of the goose itself. The rest inherited their wealth. It comes from real estate, investment, media publishing, and health care services. The usual sources of billions in wealth, so the world is not entirely topsy turvy and upside down. You don’t necessarily have to run an online glamour cult to become a billionaire in your twenties.
