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

The Martin Prosperity Institute here in Toronto recently published an interesting report called The Geography of the Global Super-Rich.

What they did was use the Forbes 2015 Billionaire List to chart billionaires and billionaire wealth by location and by industry. They also looked at the wealth gap in each location and whether the wealth was self-made or inherited.

A correlation analysis was also done to see what key variables – such as population, density, economic output, global city standing, VC investment, and so on – were positively correlated with a greater concentration of super rich people.

There are 1,826 billionaires across the world according to Forbes. The researchers were able to match 99% of them to a specific metro area / primary residence.

Here are the top 20 metro areas in terms of the number of billionaires:

Look at Miami at #9. 

I suspect that this may surprise some of you. But Miami has grown into a significant global city. As one of my friends from Miami likes to tell me: “The best thing about Miami is that it’s a Latin American city that’s so close to the United States.”

Here are the top 20 metro areas in terms of total billionaire wealth: 

A bunch of changes on this list because of extremely wealthly people and families in places like Bentonville (Arkansas) and Omaha.

One of the conclusions of the report is that the size of the city generally matters:

“The geography of the super-rich is a function of larger cities. Both the number of billionaires and their net worth are positively associated with the population of global cities, with correlations of 0.56 for the number of billionaires and 0.44 to their net worth.”

Here is a chart comparing population to the number of billionaires:

Cities such as New York, Moscow, and Hong kong, which sit far above the blue line, have more billionaires than their population size would predict.

Here is a similar chart comparing venture capital investment to the number of billionaires:

Once again, there is a positive association.

Finally, here are a two charts that show which industries have produced the most billionaires:

If you’re interested in this study, you can download the full report here. All of the charts were sourced from the report.