All the way up! Though many celebrities are very, very rich, only a handful have actually achieved billionaire status.
The 10-figure club is mostly populated by entrepreneurs and business magnates — people including Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Celebrities who breathe that rarefied air have usually diversified their portfolios to include all kinds of partnerships, investments and projects unrelated to their acting or music skills.
Rihanna, for example, became a billionaire in August 2021, but as fans know all too well, she hasn’t released an album since January 2016. The earnings that put her over the top didn’t come from her music, but rather her Fenty Beauty and Fenty Skin lines and her lucrative Savage x Fenty lingerie company.
Kanye West, another musician turned billionaire, is in the same boat as Rihanna — his music makes him far less money than his numerous other ventures. In April 2020, after months of back-and-forth, Forbes magazine finally declared that the rapper was worth about $1.3 billion, between his Yeezy holdings, real estate and other investments.
West, however, claimed that Forbes still had it wrong and estimated his own worth at more than $3 billion. “I’m not a numbers guy,” he told the magazine in July 2019. “To ask me to somehow translate this to numbers is to ask your grandmother exactly what the recipe of the cake was.”
His estranged wife, Kim Kardashian, is also a member of the billionaires’ club thanks to her Skims shapewear and KKW Beauty line, the latter of which was undergoing a refresh as of July 2021. Keeping Up With the Kardashians came to a close in June 2021, but the Dancing With the Stars alum previously said that the series ending wouldn’t make much of a dent in her profits.
“We would not be who we are today without Keeping Up With the Kardashians and that’s why we continue to share our lives,” she told David Letterman in October 2020. “Even if, realistically, we can post something on social media and make more than we do a whole season.”
The reality star didn’t say exactly how much she earns per Instagram post, but she’s said before that her payments range from $300,000 to $500,000 and sometimes north of $1 million.
Her little sister Kylie Jenner, however, is not in the club, despite a 2019 Forbes report that dubbed her the world’s youngest “self-made” billionaire. After further review of her assets, the magazine revoked the title in May 2020, claiming that the Kylie Cosmetics founder’s team had provided inaccurate documents.
The Life of Kylie alum wasn’t bothered by the change, though. “I thought this was a reputable site,” she tweeted at the time. “All I see are a number of inaccurate statements and unproven assumptions lol. I’ve never asked for any title or tried to lie my way there EVER. Period.”
Keep scrolling to see which celebrities are members of the 10-figure club:
