On March 5th, Forbes Magazine named Kylie Jenner the youngest “self-made” billionaire at age 21, beating Mark Zuckerberg at his own billion dollar valuation at 23. Excuse me while I make the world’s largest scare quotes around the word “self-made”. This ignoble award came after the magazine valued her company, Kylie Cosmetics, at $900 million, making her the youngest person to steal a billion dollars’ worth of labor before she was legally allowed to drink alcohol.
Kylie Jenner and her ilk have their defenders, though. Her millions of zombie fans obsessed with her blatantly artificial image, people who think emulating the worst aspects of toxic male business culture equals liberation, and even Fox News’ Tomi Lauren, a walking ideological cesspool, penned an op-ed in her defense:
“Here’s the deal, yeah Kylie was born into a rich, famous, and fortunate family and situation. So what? Instead of going out and getting addicted to drugs, crashing cars, or getting arrested, she took her fortunate upbringing and made it into a freakin’ huge empire. A billion dollar empire.
Good for her!”
I couldn’t have written better satire if I tried.
“She built an empire with that head start and now her tax dollars are likely subsidizing many of those haters who sit on Twitter during normal WORK hours to talk smack.
That’s pathetic.
This isn’t just about Kylie. This is bigger than that.
There is a growing movement in this country with socialist-leaning undertones, that wealth should be demonized.”
Congrats on the staggering achievement of being born into a wealthy social media celebrity family and continuing to be a wealthy social media celebrity. Truly an inspiration to girls everywhere.
This op-ed, translated from a monologue of hers, is written like bumper stickers, like Lauren knows her audience can only understand mnemonic devices and small little chunks of info. Their brains are dying and this insipid tripe might be the last thing they remember. News flash: the wealth of the rich eliteshould be demonized. It’s theft. It’s always been theft. Theft of labor, of time, of other women’s bodies so 8 PEOPLE can have as much wealth as the bottom HALF OF THE WORLD. A minivan full of people have more value than 3.5 billion. I can’t think of a single more powerful example of how this system has completely failed.
The vampires sucking us all dry are being called out for what they are: grotesque thieves flaunting their stolen goods on Instagram and dumbasses like Tomi Lauren cheering them on. Not all of the press was glowing however, with some sharp takes, such as Eva Wiseman from the Guardian calling out Jenner’s illusory sale of an aspirational lifestyle.
“With every purchase of Coconut lip liner and Yesss Girl gloss, fans buy access to a covetable life, one filled not just with crystal-studded tchotchkes but an ever-moving soap opera of babies and breakups, and theses about body image.”
Moral Tithe
Let’s examine the word “self-made” shall we? In the historical context of America’s true religion, or course. No, not White NRA Jesus, but the Cult of Meritocracy. That old adage of pulling yerself up outcher terlit by yer bootstraps, striking oil, and fanning yourself with $100 bills while the lazy, dumb serfs eat garbage and watch wrestling. It’s a sickness that permeates nearly all of American hypercapitalism, powered by a fierce propaganda effort from corporate media, advertising, and popular entertainment.
This cultish message is loud and clear: if you work hard, play by the rules, and believe in yourself, you too can ascend to the Holy Priesthood of the Billionaires. The Golden God Mammon calls to you, worm, and only you need to buy more $29 kohl eye pencils and learn to code ridesharing apps!
By the way: anyone who legitimately believes this still, in the dark year of 2019, is either a cynical grifter, a naive dullard, or suffering from a self-imposed head injury. If anything, the crash of 2009 was a wakeup call for anyone still inside the church. I mean, look who’s leading this country, from the political, to the cultural, to the media, to the economic, and you’re honestly going to look me in the eye and say the cream rises to the top? More like shit floats.
Anyone who legitimately believes this still, in the dark year of 2019, is either a cynical grifter, a naive dullard, or suffering from a self-imposed head injury.
There is simply no such thing as a self-made billionaire, not in Kylie Jenner’s case, or any other case for that matter, including the Trinity of Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Oprah. All hoarded wealth is theft from the people who actually created Jenner’s wealth, such as all the warehouse, administration, logistics and retail workers at Ulta Beauty (her exclusive distributor for her overpriced cosmetics). The number of people who work directly for Kylie Jenner, who is being celebrated as an entrepreneur and job creator? Just 12 employees: 7 fulltime and 5 part time. That’s less people that work a local pizzeria on a busy night. The rest are contractors who work for other companies.
What’s the real disconnect here is that people see value in their own work, take great pride in it (as they should), but then willingly transfer that pride and value onto rich assholes who take other people’s labor and hoard all the profits for themselves. We see someone like Kylie Jenner or Mark Zuckerberg or Oprah Winfrey as being something to aspire to, a victory of PR and image control. For the small handful of woman who achieve enormous wealth, millions of women don’t. Is it because they were all somehow just too stupid or lazy?
Jenner is a living brand, the face of a company for airbrushed, illusionary beauty made popular by participating in a TV show about wealthy and privilege that was itself a false construction of reality. Kris Jenner’s starting wealth came from Robert Kardashian, a celebrity lawyer famous for the OJ Simpson trial, another construction of reality that broke our brains. We’re down the rabbit hole, folks. I can’t think of anything more insulting to genuine feminism and female empowerment in the face of a historic reckoning of gender inequality than calling a rich snob like Jenner an “inspiration”. All because she pushed homogenized beauty standards. All because she sells an aspiration lifestyle almost no one will achieve, but keep buying into.
The Real Fair Share
The left-of-center in America is struggling with a strange, unhelpful obsession that the billionaires are a uniquely problematic class, rather than capitalism as a whole that allows massive theft that makes billionaires possible. The Bernie Sanderses of the world think that if we just tax them some sort of magical percentage, humanity will be saved and everything will be fine. That if they “pay their fair share”, whatever that means, your life will magically improve. Maybe, but I wouldn’t put too much faith in that regard. I’d hate to break this to you, but $.50 of every dollar goes to the American imperial military. Do you honestly think that will fundamentally change underneath a Democrat? (It never has, by the way.)
It’s easy to make Jeff Bezos a target. It’s effective marketing. It focuses attention. People who live in a congested media narrative need a supervillain to make that story work. It’s also much more palatable to act like this is an individual moral failure, that these are the bad billionaires over here and here are the good billionaires over here. If we just get good billionaires who favor higher taxation on themselves, out of guilt or survival instinct, that’s the preferred result. I’ve rarely seen an elected official or a media personality actively ask the question, “Why do billionaires even exist?”
In a way, this obsession with the individual morality of billionaires is the liberal inversion of the “poor people are poor because they’re lazy” trope that’s dominated the mainstream for decades. It’s the same lie that economic circumstances are always supernaturally controlled by one’s own moral compass, and if that compass faces true north, success or justice awaits.
The answer to this lie of the self-made billionaire is to highlight the contradictions within that lie by exposing the reality of labor, and to accurately see the world as a highly connected, interdependent system with hard ecological limits. Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos didn’t build their companies, their workers did. A major goal of this reframing is to stop seeing yourself as this lone competitor that must decimate their enemies, leaving no one else standing. Life doesn’t have to be a battle royale.
Someone having the audacity to call themselves “self-made” when they employ thousands of subcontractors who work just as hard or harder than they must be confronted and exposed. The only reason a billionaire can exist is because millions go hungry. Howard Schultz likes to crucify himself by saying he and his elite compatriots are being persecuted. Lapdogs like Tomi Lauren think socialists are just player haters of the wealthy, as if someone advocates for the complete upending of the current economic order because they’re just so jelly.
Well, let’s get real. Schultz and company, you are being persecuted, you are under attack. By us. We do, in fact, hate you. It is normal and healthy to despise the people robbing you blind, starving your communities, and then blaming you for not liking it. A lot of people who don’t even identify as socialists can’t stand you, and good for them. They’re on the right side of history. Too many people have been withering your overt class warfare, your austerity, your cops, your jails, your pointless imperial wars, your endless self-promotion, your smug superiority, and your bullshit for far too long.
If there is anything that is self-made, it is capitalism forging the means of its own demise.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.