Here’s Why Rihanna Is a Billionaire and Her Peers Aren’t

This story is part of our Start. Build. Grow. series, a celebration of Black business.

Even if you’re in your “abolish all billionaires” bag, it’s kinda tough to apply that to Rihanna: How could you not want to see her win big?

In our on-going series on Black business, we take a look at how Ri-Ri started and built her billions: The Barbadian beauty became the youngest self-made female billionaire and youngest female billionaire in 2022. She’s worth about $1.4 billion today, placing her among the top five richest Black women in the world. Though Rihanna has numerous music accolades – second highest-selling woman artist of all time behind Madonna and nine-time Grammy winner – the music alone didn’t make her a billionaire.

In fact, pop megastars rarely get that wealthy from music — Taylor Swift might be the only living artist who hit the big-B from music alone, thanks to her dumb-successful 2023 “Eras Tour.”  

Kanye West, Jay-Z and Dr. Dre each have a boatload of No. 1 singles, but they hit billionaire status with their business ventures and apparel companies. Yeezys, Roc-A-Wear and Beats by Dre provided their bump to the big bread. RiRi got there by launching her Fenty Beauty in 2018, the same year she founded her also-successful Savage x Fenty lingerie brand.

Since you or at least five Black women you know rock the makeup, lingerie or both, Fenty Beauty became the world’s biggest celebrity-owned brand as of last November.

Interestingly, Rihanna’s oft-compared music “rival,” Beyoncé, has yet to hit that 10-figure mark (she’s “only” worth about $800 million) because her own wildly successful tour and record-setting Grammys run wasn’t quite enough to get there. And her discontinued Ivy Park brand didn’t slap with the masses.

But c’mon – if Bey has less than $200 million to go, she’ll get there soon…maybe via that country album she’s planning to drop in a few weeks…?

RiRi had a renaissance moment about a year ago, starting with a much-talked about British VOGUE cover in Feb. 2023 that pissed off less enlightened souls because she’s depicted as leading her boyfriend A$AP Rocky and their son Star. That same month, following a lengthy career break of no albums or singles, she had a royal comeback by way of headlining the 2023 Super Bowl Halftime Show and executing the biggest pregnancy reveal ever.

(Oddly enough, that’s probably the one career move that landed her the least amount of upfront bread, since Super Bowl halftime performers don’t get paid.)

Basically, if you want to become a billionaire, all you have to do is follow the Rihanna blueprint: Have a wildly successful music career, leverage that into a brand that fulfills a specific and oft-neglected need (Black makeup palates!), chuck deuces to the world for a little bit, then return and remind these fools how you do it on the literal world’s biggest stage.

Easy, right?