How Award-Winning Barbadian Musician, Rihanna Became America’s Youngest Self-Made Billionaire

Award-winning musician Robyn Fenty, known to the world as Rihanna, has been named the United States’ youngest self-made billionaire after her net worth hits an outstanding $1.7 billion.

Born in Saint Michael and raised in Bridgetown, Barbados, Rihanna auditioned for American record producer Evan Rogers, who invited her to the United States to record demo tapes. Proud Bajan she is.

The Barbadian singer, actress, and businesswoman, who clocked 35 in February, amassed her fortune from her music and entrepreneurial ventures. For the third consecutive time, Rihanna, who heads her company, Fenty Beauty, as CEO, graced Forbes’ annual list of America’s richest self-made women.

When she launched Fenty Beauty in 2017, she sought to create a cosmetics company that made “women everywhere feel included.” A perhaps unintended consequence: The beauty line has helped her enter one of the world’s most exclusive ranks: billionaire.

Rihanna is now worth $1.7 billion, according to Forbes estimates in 2021, making her the wealthiest female musician in the world and second only to Oprah Winfrey as the richest female entertainer. But it’s not her music that’s made her so wealthy. The bulk of her fortune (an estimated $1.4 billion) comes from the value of Fenty Beauty, of which Forbes can now confirm she owns 50%. Much of the rest lies in her stake in her lingerie company, Savage x Fenty, worth an estimated $270 million, and her earnings from her career as a chart-topping musician and actress.

She ranked 21st overall and is the list’s only billionaire under the age of 40. Some of Rihanna’s $1.7 billion net worth is from her successful music career. Most of it is from her three retail companies: Fenty Beauty, Fenty Skin, and Savage X Fenty.

Earlier in March, Bloomberg reported Savage X Fenty Lingerie was working with advisors on an IPO that could potentially be valued at $3 billion. Rihanna owns 30% of that company, CNBC reported.

Available online and at Sephora stores, which are also owned by LVMH, the products were an instant success. By 2018, its first full calendar year, the line was bringing in more than $550 million in annual revenues, according to LVMH, beating out other celebrity-founded brands like Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics, Kim Kardashian West’s KKW Beauty, and Jessica Alba’s Honest Co.

“A lot of women felt there were no lines out there that catered to their skin tone. It was light, medium, medium dark, dark,” says Shannon Coyne, cofounder of consumer products consultancy Bluestock Advisors. “We all know that’s not reality. She was one of the first brands that came out and said, ‘I want to speak to all of those different people.’”

Rihanna’s impressive figures are also reflected in her music career, with nine Grammy awards to her name. In 2019, she told The New York Times’ T Magazine that because she never planned on making a fortune, reaching financial milestones was “not going to stop me from working.

While cosmetics sales slowed during the pandemic, beauty companies are worth as much as ever. Stocks of larger beauty conglomerates like Estée Lauder and L’Oréal have bounced back, reaching all-time highs and trading at an impressive 7.5 (or more) times annual revenues. Meanwhile, independent brands like Beautycounter and Charlotte Tilbury inked deals with investment firms earlier this year at billion-dollar valuations.

That is good news for Rihanna. Thanks to the impressive multiples at which beauty companies are trading, Fenty Beauty is worth a conservative $2.8 billion, Forbes estimates. And all signs point to the company continuing to grow. In its annual report for 2020, LVMH said Fenty Skin, which launched last year, was off to a “very promising start” and “generated unprecedented buzz,” and that Fenty Beauty “maintained its appeal as a premier makeup brand.

“My money is not for me; it’s always the thought that I can help someone else. The world can really make you believe that the wrong things are a priority, and it makes you really miss the core of life and what it means to be alive,” she said.

Rihanna started a philanthropic fund called the Clara Lionel Foundation (CLF) in 2012. The foundation aims to “support and fund groundbreaking education and climate resilience initiatives,” according to its website.

One of its first initiatives, which launched a year after the foundation began, raised $60 million for women and children affected by HIV/AIDS through sales from the singer’s lipstick line with MAC Cosmetics. And in January, CLF paired up with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s #SmartSmall initiative to donate a combined $15 million to 18 different climate justice groups.

In 2017, Harvard University named Rihanna 2017’s Humanitarian of the Year to recognise her for working to improve cancer treatment in Barbados, where she was born, and for setting up a college scholarship to bring Caribbean students to study in the United States.

While Barbados-born Rihanna isn’t the only celebrity to capitalize on her social media presence—she has 101 million followers on Instagram and 108 million on Twitter—to build a beauty brand, she is the most successful beauty entrepreneur to do so. Fenty Beauty, which is a 50-50 joint venture with French luxury goods conglomerate LVMH (run by Bernard Arnault, the world’s second-richest person), launched in 2017 with the goal of inclusivity. Its products come in a diverse range of colours—the foundation is offered in 50 shades, including harder-to-find darker shades for women of colour—and are modelled in its advertising by an equally diverse group of people.

Not that everything Rihanna touches turns to gold. In February, LVMH and Rihanna confirmed in a statement to Forbes that they had shut down their other venture, a high-end fashion and accessories house also called Fenty. Launched in 2019, Fenty sought to extend Rihanna’s brand of inclusivity and offer styles in a range of sizes. But like many luxury fashion brands, the high-priced line suffered during the pandemic, releasing its last collection in November 2020.

The only complaint some fans may have about her career as a fashion and beauty mogul? It keeps her busy. The singer, who used to release an album almost every year, hasn’t released a new album since 2016’s Anti.

From a financial perspective, that may be just fine. “She is creating a brand outside of herself. It’s not just about Rihanna,” says consultant Coyne. “Even if you don’t like her music, she’s created a real style in the fashion and beauty space.”