Kylie Jenner has made a lot of money in her short life, but she didn’t start from scratch.
Kylie Jenner worth $900 million, on track to be the youngest self-made billionaire ever
There’s Now a GoFundMe Page Dedicated To Making Kylie Jenner A Billionaire … Because $900 million wasn’t good enough
Kylie Jenner Is ‘Self-Made’ And Other Myths We Tell About The Extremely Wealthy
When Forbes magazine released its list of the richest “self-made” female entrepreneurs on Wednesday, Kylie Jenner was its cover star. At just 20, she is worth an estimated $900 million.
The use of “self-made” to describe Jenner’s vast wealth raised a lot of eyebrows. The magazine defined a self-made entrepreneur as someone who didn’t inherit a portion of their money and instead built up their own fortunes. Jenner’s riches come from her enormously successful Kylie Cosmetics business, which she started with $250,000 earned through modeling and endorsements.
But that rather overlooks the fact that Jenner comes from a family of huge wealth and privilege ― and an unflagging zeal for marketing their own. Twitter users hastened to point this out.
How @KylieJenner built a $900 million fortune in less than 3 years — at age 20, she’s on track to become the youngest self made billionaire in history, ahead of Mark Zuckerberg #SelfMadeWomen https://t.co/MEOyvm4n5s
— Moira Forbes (@moiraforbes) July 11, 2018
In America, there is a culture that celebrates other people’s enormous wealth. When the Forbes cover came out, Jenner’s fans on Twitter started a GoFundMe page to raise the $100 million she needs to cross the threshold into the billionaires club. In May, a crowdfunding campaign was launched to buy a new sofa for Elon Musk when he complained about having to sleep on his office floor.
But the way we talk and think about the extremely rich often ignores the systems that got them there, or what it means for the rest of society to have such concentrations of wealth.
Here we take a deeper look into a few of the key myths about the wealthy.
Anyone Can Get Rich If They Work Hard Enough
The American Dream says that anyone who works hard enough, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, can get rich. And some people do make the journey from rags ― or at least lower incomes ― to riches.
Bu the opportunity for others to join them seems to be shrinking. Social mobility has actually declined in the U.S. and today’s younger generation could end up poorer than their parents, according to research from the McKinsey Global Institute.
The great truth is this: Wealth tends to beget wealth. Rich parents can afford to send their kids to top-notch schools and colleges, leading to better opportunities, leading to the continuing build-up of wealth and privilege.
“It’s not just as if each generation you get some people who do really well and become rich, but then you reset,” said Richard Reeves, senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank. “As income inequality becomes wealth inequality, that’s much easier to pass on generation to generation.”
Even if Kylie Jenner has increased her fortune remarkably quickly, by virtue of the family she was born into she had a phenomenal head start.
Wealth inequality is a huge factor in the U.S. In 1983 upper-income families had 28 times the wealth of lower-income families; by 2016 that figure had increased to 75 times that of lower-income families, according to the Pew Research Center. The top 1 percent now controls 38.6 percent of the country’s wealth; the bottom 90 percent holds only 22.8 percent.
There’s a racial angle too ― in the U.S. and across the globe. In 2016, the median wealth of white American households was $171,000, while the median wealth of black American households was $17,100, according to Pew. On Forbes’ list of the world’s billionaires this year, just 11 of 2,043 are black.
And being male has long been a big advantage.