Forbes recently pegged social media influencer Kylie Jenner’s net worth at somewhere around $900 million. That makes her the youngest (she’s 20) person on Forbes’ annual ranking of “America’s Richest Self-Made Women.”
And if the trend line continues, she’ll be the youngest self-made billionaire, ever. Mark Zuckerberg apparently holds that title right now. But he was a classic underachiever and only became a billionaire at age 23.
Most of Kylie’s net worth is derived from Kylie Cosmetics, which launched less than 3 years ago, but did an estimated $330 million in revenue last year. Forbes values the company at almost $800 million. And Kylie owns every bit of it.
The reason I am mentioning this today is because I was fascinated by the above Forbes article. It’s such a powerful example of social media leverage. Forbes put it differently: “Social media has weaponized fame.”
Kylie has 111 million followers on Instagram (plus many more on her other social channels) and that’s really the most important part of this equation. She has the distribution and reach to acquire boat loads of customers. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling if nobody knows you’re selling it.
The rest of her business is pretty much outsourced. Seed Beauty (out of Oxnard, California and Nanjing, China) handles the manufacturing, packaging, and shipping fulfillment. Shopify (headquartered in Ottawa) is her e-commerce platform.
We could of course have a debate about whether a celebrity-fueled business is really all that sustainable. And perhaps there’s risk in relying so heavily on social for customer acquisition. But youngest billionaire is youngest billionaire.
Image: Forbes
Steven Sinofsky recently tweeted out this thread where he talks about the virtues of writing in business. His argument: writing is thinking.
Writing is difficult. It takes a lot of time. I’ve been writing posts – albeit short ones – on this blog every day for almost 5 years and I can tell you that somedays it is downright painful. Somedays I ask myself: Would I be better served spending this time elsewhere?
It’s much easier to talk, throw down bullet points on a slide, or send out pithy emails. And because, today, we’re all so focused on “agility” and “execution”, it is easy to dismiss writing as being slow and cumbersome.
But the act of writing is indeed thinking. To write about something you have to wade into the details and actually understand what you’re talking about. It’s far more nuanced.
One of Sinofsky’s arguments is that “execution is in a constant state of diverging as more expertise deals with more details that fewer people understand.” Business becomes “I just know.” Writing can fill in those missing parts.
He goes on to argue that agility is also not mutually exclusive with writing. In fact, when you write, clarify, and collaborate early on, overall execution speeds up because now people get the details and better understand the context.
I’ve mentioned this before on the blog, but my Grade 4 English teacher used to make us write a daily journal. He would tell us that it didn’t matter what we wrote or how long it was, but we had to write something every day.
I did it and I enjoyed keeping those journals, but at the time I didn’t really appreciate was he was trying to get us to do. I do now.
Lately I have really gotten into Matt Levine’s daily newsletter about “Wall Street, finance, companies and other stuff.” Maybe that’s how I should describe this blog: Cities, real estate, design, and other stuff.
If you aren’t familiar with Matt’s writing, here is an article that he wrote about Kylie Jenner’s recent tweet concerning Snapchat. You know, the one that wiped out $1.3 billion of market value because she revealed – using only 88 characters, I might add – that she was no longer using the app.
sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me… ugh this is so sad.
— Kylie Jenner (@KylieJenner) February 21, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The article was spurred on by this question:
“Would it be insider trading for Kylie Jenner to buy short term out of money put options on Snap and tweet out that she’s no longer using Snap?”
And this is the start of his answer:
Insider trading, as I am constantly saying around here, is not about fairness; it is about theft. It is not illegal to trade on your own nonpublic knowledge of your own intentions. Warren Buffett can buy stocks before he announces that he’s bought them, even though that announcement will predictably make the stocks go up.
If I did describe this daily blog like Matt describes his daily newsletter, this post would clearly fall into the “other stuff” camp. But maybe you too will find it interesting. If you do, you can subscribe here.