7 celebrities who reached billionaire status
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Kim Kardashian is Hollywood's newest billionaire, according to Forbes.
The list of Tinseltown's wealthiest, however, doesn't have anyone who became rich solely off acting.
Many of Hollywood's billionaires, including Jay-Z, made their fortunes from business ventures.
A lot of Hollywood entertainers are extremely wealthy - but fewer than you might think are actually billionaires.
What sets these seven billionaire entertainers and studio executives apart from their peers is not only that they excelled in the industry, but that they leveraged their success to make investments that provide significant income beyond their salaries.
Hollywood's billionaires' club may not stay small for long, however, as more and more stars launch their own clothing and beauty lines. In the last year, Kanye West, Tyler Perry, and Kim Kardashian have joined the group.
Here's a closer look at how seven Hollywood celebrities who are also billionaires built their fortunes.
Kim Kardashian is Hollywood's newest billionaire with a net worth of $1 billion, according to Forbes.
Kim Kardashian is officially a billionaire, according to Forbes.
On Tuesday, the businesswoman and reality TV personality joined her estranged husband, Kanye West, in the elusive three comma club club made up of only six other Hollywood elite.
Kardashian, who got her start as a closet organizer for fellow socialite Paris Hilton in the early 2000s, now runs multiple successful businesses like Skims (a shapewear brand) and KKW Beauty (a cosmetics company).
She added about $220 million to her net worth since September 2020, bringing her total fortune to $1 billion, Forbes reports.
Forbes estimates that Kardashian's two highly lucrative businesses — Skims and KKW Beauty — combined with cash from TV and endorsement deals are responsible for the bulk of her wealth. In 2020, cosmetics giant Coty paid $200 million for a 20% stake in KKW Beauty, valuing the company at $1 billion.
Tyler Perry, the man behind the wildly successful "Madea" movie franchise, has an estimated net worth of $1 billion.
Tyler Perry is an Atlanta-based writer, producer, and actor behind comic productions that tell the often-overlooked stories of Black America on national stage tours, BET, and the silver screen.
He's perhaps best known for the "Madea" films, based on the character of a tough elderly woman he created and portrayed.
Forbes estimates that Perry has a net worth of $1 billion. Because Perry controls every aspect of his projects' production from his 330-acre Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, he generated $1.4 billion in pretax income since 2005, Forbes reported.
Perry told Forbes he adopted that business strategy on the advice of fellow Hollywood billionaire Oprah Winfrey.
Kanye West is a billionaire, although his exact net worth is disputed.
Kanye West may have made a lot of money from his hit albums, but it's his streetwear brand Yeezy that made him a billionaire, Forbes reported in April 2020.
However, never a stranger to controversy, West's net worth has also attracted a fair amount of debate.
Bloomberg reported in March that the Yeezy portion of West's empire (including an unreleased partnership with Gap) was valued between $3.2 billion and $4.7 billion by investment company UBS. This, in turn, led to multiple publications placing his net worth at $6.6 billion.
Forbes pushed back against the reports that West is worth almost $7 billion, arguing that a lot of the reasoning behind the high number came from projected earnings that have yet to materialize and that his actual net worth is somewhere closer to $1.8 billion.
According to Forbes, West's fortune is divided between a $1.5 billion stake in Yeezy, $160 million in cash and other assets, $90 million in music catalog, and his stake in Skims, estranged wife Kim Kardashian's shapewear brand.
Jay-Z's investments have made him the world's first billionaire rapper, with a net worth of $1.4 billion.
Jay-Z — producer of impactful albums like "4:44," Beyoncé husband, and Blue Ivy's dad — is one of the most influential men in music. But it's his business acumen, not his musical talent, that has solidified his status as a billionaire.
Jay-Z finalized a number of lucrative deals in March, including selling a majority stake in his streaming service Tidal to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's Square Inc. He also sold half of his champagne brand, Armand de Brignac, to LVMH. These two high-profile deals increased his net worth by 40%, from $1 billion to $1.4 billion, according to Forbes.
Jay-Z bought Tidal for $56 million in 2015. In 2017, Sprint bought a 33% stake in the company for $200 million, which put the company's valuation at $600 million. A decade before that, he sold a clothing line that he founded to Iconix for $204 million in 2007. He also co-owns cognac brand D'Ussé.
Forbes breaks his net worth into $425 million in cash and investments, $320 million in Armand de Brignac, $140 million in Roc Nation (his entertainment company founded in partnership with Live Nation), $120 million in D'Ussé, $95 million in music catalog, $70 million in art collections, and $50 million in real estate.
Media mogul Oprah Winfrey is worth $2.6 billion.
Born to a single mother in rural Mississippi, Oprah Winfrey started out as a news anchor before spending 25 years hosting "The Oprah Winfrey Show."
The investments Winfrey made with her share of the show's profits are now worth about $2 billion, Forbes estimates. She became a billionaire in 2003, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Winfrey, now 67, also leveraged her show's success to build a media empire and amassed a fortune of $2.6 billion in the process, according to Forbes. She owns 25.5% of her television network OWN, an 7% stake in WW International, and has a content creation deal with Apple TV+.
Oprah has also voiced characters in "Charlotte's Web," "The Bee Movie," and "The Princess and the Frog," in addition to starring in "Lee Daniels' The Butler" and "Selma," among others, according to The Oprah Magazine.
Three-time Academy Award-winning director Steven Spielberg is worth $3.7 billion.
The box office success of "Jaws," "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," and "Jurassic Park," among others, have made Steven Spielberg the top-grossing director of all time by a wide margin.
According to Forbes, most of Spielberg's fortune comes from his films, but he has also profited from his role as a consultant for Universal theme parks and the sale of DreamWorks Animation to NBCUniversal for $3.8 billion in 2016.
Spielberg, 74, co-founded DreamWorks Pictures alongside Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.
George Lucas, the creator of the "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" franchises, is worth $7.4 billion.
Lucas, 76, might be the brains behind two of the most well-known film franchises of our time, but he made most of his money by selling his production studio Lucasfilm to Disney for $4.05 billion in cash and stock in 2012, according to Bloomberg.
Lucas also executive produced "The Land Before Time" and wrote "American Graffiti," according to IMDb. His highest-grossing film, "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace," brought in $474 million at the box office.
While Lucas originally aspired to be a racecar driver, he decided to pursue filmmaking after nearly dying in a car crash. Lucas studied filmmaking at USC before founding Lucasfilm, according to the university's website. Lucas retired from his studio in 2012 in order to turn his attention to independent films, according to The New York Times.
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