Rihanna is a billionaire now worth 1.7 billion.
Kim Kardashian is reported to be worth a billion.
Kanye West is worth 1.8 billion dollars.
Rihanna made 85% of her money off Fenty which launched in 2017.
KKW by Kim Kardashian launched in 2017.
Kanye West closed a deal for Yeezy to partner with Adidas in 2015.
Within a period of 5 years, three people were able to launch companies doing pretty conventional products that didn’t innovate much and become billionaires almost overnight.
Just to compare that.
Bill Gates launched Microsoft in 1975 and became a billionaire in 1986.
Warren Buffett took over Berkshire in 1962 and didn’t become a billionaire until 1990.
Larry Ellison started Oracle in 1977 and became a billionaire around 1990.
There’s this wave of celebrity billionaires which are getting rich a lot quicker over tech or any other industry and method seems to be this.
Find a high margin product.
Require it to take almost no time to make.
Be the face of it.
Partner with an Adidas or Louis Vuitton that can get it everywhere.
Market it until on Forbes front page for how much made selling it.
It sort of feels too simple, but have some rational behind it.
First up, they are ultimately selling themselves.
Kanye West launched Yeezy/Adidas in 2015 at age 39, but his career launched in 1996 at age 19.
Kim Kardashian launched KKW when she was 36, but was active basically since OJ.
Rihanna started Fenty at age 29, but her career started when just 15.
So while the actual companies grow fast, the brand behind them took decades.
The other big gap between a billionaire like Kanye West and someone like Bill Gates is it’s a lot easier for Kanye West to get ruined.
Big example, Kylie Jenner.
Kylie Jenner was a billionaire in 2020 and now is worth 700 million.
Still a lot, but it fell due to her brand losing popularity.
Part of the problem is she’s a billionaire off a lipstick brand during the age of mask, but other issue was a lot of competition and sales shrunk pre COVID.
She also had competition where basically every model/actress with a large following online has moved to some form of lipstick.
This makes a case that while it’s harder for someone like Bill Gates to get rich, there’s an infrastructure that is ridiculously hard to take down.
Kanye West could tweet something bad and sales drop.
Rihanna could date someone the public doesn’t like and sales drop.
Kim Kardashian could just get older and sales go to someone new.
We’re going to get more fad billionaires, but we’ll also get a lot of fast bust.