The Mystery of Kylie Jenner’s True Net Worth

Did she really falsify tax documents to get on Forbes's billionaires list?

In 2018, journalist and podcaster Natalie Robehmed authored the Forbes cover story about Kylie Jenner with the infamous headline about her being set to become “the youngest-ever self-made billionaire.” Robehmed didn’t come up with that headline, but understood the criticism that followed: how could Kylie possibly be “self-made” with the incalculable privilege that comes with being part of such a wealthy and famous family?

Earlier in Back Row: Why the Vibe Shift Might Finally Leave the Kardashians Behind

While commenters pounced on the framing of the piece, Robehmed didn’t doubt what she reported: that then-20-year-old Kylie was worth $900 million, and would soon rank on Forbes’s famous billionaires list. She was a notable business figure thanks to the success of Kylie Cosmetics. Anyone tuned into online beauty trends or popular culture in the 2010s likely well remembers the matte lips that became synonymous with Kylie, and how she cleverly commodified them with lip kits containing liquid lipsticks and matching liners. The ongoing success of Kylie Cosmetics was what officially pushed her onto Forbes’s billionaires’ list in 2019, at which time Robehmed published another story about just that.

However, everything changed in 2020, when Forbes printed another article titled, “Inside Kylie Jenner’s Web of Lies – And Why She’s No Longer a Billionaire.” Robehmed was no longer working at the magazine by then, but the story questioned whether what the Jenners had told her was actually true.

The stories she did on Kylie have nagged at Robehmed ever since, prompting her to reexamine them in the delicious mini-series, “Plumping Profits?: A Kardashian Scandal,” part of Campside Media’s Infamous podcast. Featuring commentary from journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis, who shares her experiences writing about Kim Kardashian, the episodes retrace Robehmed’s reporting and the events that led Forbes to believe she had been misled; it also considers what got lost in the conversation about Kylie and her mom Kris allegedly falsifying financial records for Kylie Cosmetics.

I talked to Robehmed about the podcast and her experiences reporting on Kylie. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

It’s brave of you as a journalist to revisit your reporting and try to figure out what you may have gotten wrong. Did you think about it that way as you were working on the podcast?

A lot of the Infamous series that Vanessa and I are doing is revisiting our greatest hits. This was one that I knew I wanted to tackle. Also, I think it's really important to admit when maybe you were wrong. I had just about enough distance to be able to look back at this and be like, OK, perhaps this didn't quite add up.

Hearing what goes into creating the billionaires’ list was fascinating — I had no idea just how much reporting goes into figuring out how much people are worth.

Literally years of my life and so many other reporters’ lives [have gone into that list]. It really is a huge amount of work. When people have shares in publicly held companies, it's a little bit easier because a lot of that information is publicly available. You can look up how many shares they hold and look at the current price of the stock. But there are so many other parts. You have to look up people's property records and figure out how much their houses are worth. And then if it's a private company, it's a whole other ball game where you just have to be doing a lot of research and talking to experts.

Kylie Cosmetics was a private company when you first started reporting on it. What led you to start looking into it?

In 2017, I started to hear some very high numbers from Kylie's publicist, telling me that the business was really huge. I did a whole series of off-the-record meetings and a lot of back and forth to try and understand how big Kylie Cosmetics was. I got a set of tax returns from her team. I ran out of time and we ended up going with a much more conservative estimate for this list of a hundred highest earning celebrities, which I used to co-edit with another reporter at Forbes. Then I was like, I'm going to look at this for the next year and figure out what's really going on with the business.

If the company was looking for someone to report that higher revenue figure that you didn’t feel comfortable going with at that time, they could probably find another outlet to do that, right?

After I didn't run very high numbers, I saw Women's Wear Daily did. It seemed to have been an exact recreation of the meeting that I'd had. And [WWD] went with it. It's almost like, when somebody starts saying something, that's the way it is. The reputation of the company suddenly caught up with the numbers I was seeing on the tax documents. So by 2018, we ran with this much higher valuation that put Kylie at $900 million net worth.

And what additional reporting did you do to arrive at the conclusion that this was a fair number to report in 2018?

I did a lot. Calling former employees. I actually went up to Spatz Labs, where Kylie Cosmetics was being manufactured at the time. Ultimately what it came down to was these tax returns. I'd done lots of different valuations at Forbes of billionaires’ net worth and various things. What it comes down to is, you want documents. That's the standard of proof. You want actual numbers on a page that somebody has verified. And these all passed the smell test. The numbers were crazy high, but it all looked really legit.

So then in 2019, you reported that she was a billionaire.

By March 2019, it was time to do the Forbes billionaires’ list. Per all these various sources, revenues were up again, so we put her net worth at a billion dollars. And then I left Forbes, and to be honest, I stopped thinking about it. I started working in podcasts.

Then Coty acquired 51% of Kylie cosmetics for $600 million cash. And that deal valued the company at $1.2 billion. I was like, Whoa. We were right.

But this was also around the time that information came to light that suggested you weren’t right – and Forbes started looking into it again.

Coty is a public company. And public companies don't mess around. They do their due diligence before they do a deal. I got a call from former colleagues of mine who were still at Forbes and working on another story, because what came out was that the revenues of Kylie Cosmetics was far smaller than I'd previously reported.

Coty had taken these lower numbers and used a higher multiple. When you're valuing private companies, you use a multiple of sales. So they'd used a much higher multiple than I had, and that's how they'd landed at this higher valuation even with lower revenue numbers.

[Ed. note: According to Coty documents, Kylie Cosmetics sales were up 40 percent from 2018, which Forbes reported would put them at around $125 million, “nowhere near the $360 million the Jenners had led Forbes to believe.” Meanwhile, Kylie’s team had told the magazine her skincare brand, which launched in May of 2019, did $100 million in sales the first month and a half, but according to public filings, it was only “on track” to close the year with sales of $25 million.]

In the podcast, you interviewed journalist Madeline Berg about the 2020 Forbes story she co-authored about Kylie’s “web of lies.” That story says it’s possible that “Kylie’s business quietly fell by more than half in a single year,” from 2017 to 2018. But the piece also states that it’s “[m]ore likely” that: “The business was never that big to begin with, and the Jenners have lied about it every year since 2016 — including having their accountant draft tax returns with false numbers — to help juice Forbes’ estimates of Kylie’s earnings and net worth. While we can’t prove that those documents were fake (though it’s likely), it’s clear that Kylie’s camp has been lying.”

They tried to get comment [from the Jenners]. And as Berg says in the podcast, if Forbes was wrong or there was some simple explanation for why the revenue seemed so much lower, you'd think that Coty would want to correct them. You'd think that the Kardashians would want to correct the record — and they didn't. So they published the story with the dramatic headline, and then Kylie responded with tweets like, “What am I waking up to?” Her lawyers sent a comment to Forbes basically saying we dispute this, we've never lied and never falsified tax returns.

To be clear, we don’t know if Kylie falsified the tax returns. Her team gave them to you because they knew you were trying to place a value on the company and Kylie’s net worth. And you assumed that the documents they gave you were accurate.

Right. But you do reporting on top of that to make sure that you're covering all your bases. I talked to so many experts. A lot of these analysts who look at public companies also look at private companies because they're watching what's going on in the market. So I did a lot more reporting to basically be like, does this seem right?

Honestly, my personal opinion is that they didn’t falsify their tax returns, because I just don't see why they would. It just seems like so much effort to go through. I just can't wrap my mind around doing that. But maybe I don't want to think that I was lied to.

You note in the podcast that your story sort of set up the Coty deal. Can you explain that?

My article made Kylie look very good. Here's what I asked: “Have you thought about taking outside investment or selling the company at all?” And Kylie goes, “I think we just — Mom, if you wanna add on…” And Kris goes, “Well, I think that, you know, we're always interested in growing the infrastructure for a business that I think is going to be extremely healthy for years to come. So, you know, it's always something that we're willing to explore.” I put that quote in my story. I also had a quote from an Ulta executive, because Kylie Cosmetics was newly in Ulta at the time, saying, “It could easily be an instant game-changing acquisition for any company on the hunt for a winning brand with a younger customer.” So reading that back, I was like, Oh, man, if you're a big makeup company and you want to acquire a brand with a younger audience, Forbes just said that this company has this great young audience and they're willing to explore acquisition.

This kind of thing comes up in business reporting all the time. I recently read about a big fashion brand that had almost acquired a smaller fashion brand, and my takeaway from that story was that the company that wasn’t acquired still wanted to be — and was using that item to let the fashion and financial industries know it. That’s not to say that these stories aren’t worth telling, but the media is used strategically in this way.

Completely. And perhaps Kylie benefited from Forbes, but perhaps Forbes also benefited from Kylie. She generated a huge amount of traffic for the website.

When you interviewed Kylie and Kris together, how did it seem like they divided responsibilities of running Kylie Cosmetics?

It really felt like Kylie's the creative person. People would say, “What about this for this launch?” She'd say, “No, yes, no. We have to do pink gloss. We can't do white anymore.” But as far as units per customer or whatever, I don't know that she was drilling down on that. It really felt to me like Kris was more abreast of the business.

Kylie’s net worth in the Forbes article about her web of lies was placed at $900 million — so still huge, but no longer a billionaire. Last month, the magazine placed it $680 million. What’s your reaction to those figures?

That's the part that I think gets lost in this — they're still so rich, so much richer than any of us will ever be. So it's kind of like, of course it matters, but we are missing the bigger picture, which is they still ascended in an absolutely crazy way.

How do you view their place in the culture today? The 2010s felt like that was really this family’s decade, and I’ve written about how the 2020s could be when they finally start to fade.

Maybe Kylie Cosmetics has faded slightly, maybe [Kim Kardashian’s brand] KKW Beauty has faded slightly, but Skims is now bigger than Kylie Cosmetics ever was.

There’s been a lot of talk about the Kardashians being over. That may be wishful thinking. I just don't think you can say the Kardashians are over when Skims is now worth $4 billion.

To play devil’s advocate with Skims – the company could theoretically go south at any time. The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story about how Allbirds was huge and then totally lost its way, for instance.

Of course. You’d think [the Kardashian-Jenners] would just stop at a certain point. I think they are very good at keeping up with times and being aware of what is in fashion and what is not. And I think they're very attuned to the public conversation.

Their show The Kardashians on Hulu had gotten some criticism for maybe being boring. And then this season, we're getting a lot more conflict between Kourtney and Kim. And we're also getting Kim talking a lot more about her split with Kanye. It's like they knew that people weren't feeling it and they've amped it back up. So I would never count them out.

Hear the full series, “Plumping Profits?: A Kardashian Scandal” in the Infamous podcast. Episode one is here.