Kylie Jenner uproar shows it’s fine to be successful – unless you’re a young woman

Kylie Jenner, the daughter of Kris and Caitlyn (formely Bruce) Jenner, sister of supermodel Kendall Jenner, and half-sister of Kim, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian (stay focussed), was named this week by Forbes as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.

Fair enough if you don’t know, or don’t care, who these people are. They are a reality TV dynasty from California. Not interesting so far. But bear with me – when a 21-year-old is proclaimed the world’s youngest self-made billionaire it demands some attention. Billionaires are a pretty interesting social phenomenon – Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Bill Gates of Windows, Oprah of … Oprah? And now Kylie Jenner, all populate the very upper echelon of capitalist society. How on earth did Kylie Jenner get there?

Since the announcement the internet has been ablaze with fury at the moniker “self-made”. “Calling Kylie Jenner ‘self-made’ is an insult to hardworking millennials,” The Independent said. “The ‘Self-Made Billionaire’ is a lie,” raged The Huffington Post. The Irish Times quipped: “Kylie Jenner is named youngest self-made billionaire. Self-made? Really?”

Critics aren’t happy at the notion that Jenner, a 21-year-old from immense privilege, could claim her position is self-made. Is she really a “self-made” billionaire? Is there even such a thing? (Hint: Of course not).

Forbes defines “self-made” as a billionaire who didn’t inherit their fortune but built it. So with that working definition, let’s assess: In 2014, Kylie Jenner (aged 17) used $250,000 of her earnings from reality TV as the first investment in her make-up line. She is the CEO and owner of Kylie Cosmetics. It’s from the eponymous cosmetic empire that Jenner made her fortune. By Forbes’ standards that sounds pretty self-made.

There are a few caveats. One – Kylie is the sole-owner of the makeup line because she didn’t need to find any investors to get it off the ground. She already had a cool quarter of a million ready to invest in matte-lipsticks and oh-so-on-trend highlighter pallets (that’s a makeup thing, very millennial). So obviously without that, she may not have reached billionaire status yet, what with having to hand out the bulk of the profits to savvy investors.

Caveat number two. She is the youngest in the Kardashian empire. In 2003 the Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner cemented the family’s position at the centre of global pop culture with the pilot of now hit reality TV show Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

Since then, the Kardashian family haven’t just followed the cultural zeitgeist, manipulating it for their financial gain. They are the zeitgeist. Kardashians do, world follows. So with that in mind – Kylie Jenner had a pretty good head start. Not to mention a huge social media following (128m Instagram followers at the time of writing), Jenner’s first quarter of a million came from work handed to her for no reason beyond her place in one of the world’s most famous families.

But Kylie Jenner’s billion dollars is her own money, not inherited, and it is from her own company. That ticks all the self-made boxes in Forbes’ eyes. But she wouldn’t have been in the position to make any of this money if it weren’t for her family. So, in that sense, not self-made. Hardly complicated. But if we are going to use the latter definition, the number of people who fall into that category is vanishingly small.

So why the internet outrage? Are we really going to pretend that we’ve only realised now that wealth begets wealth?

When it comes to Kylie Jenner, that very simple and practically ancient phenomenon is just on a bigger scale. Rather than Mummy and Daddy buying Felix a flat in Clapham so he doesn’t worry about rent while he finds a job at HSBC, this was Mummy and Daddy Jenner simply placing Kylie into a multi-million dollar empire, and she went from there. It’s the same phenomenon, on speed.

She is hardly the first person to have had help. Donald Trump had a pretty cushy background too. So why such a furore over Jenner?

It looks as though it is down to the fact that Kylie Jenner is a 21-year-old girl. It just doesn’t feel right, does it? And her billions come from a make-up line (how frivolous!). And she hails from The Kardashian dynasty, often typified as an emblem of the decline of American culture into rampant stupidity.

But taking a hefty social media platform following and turning it into a billion-dollar empire seems pretty smart to me.

In the meantime, and sadly for the naysayers, Kylie Jenner is probably unbothered. And worth a billion dollars.