Women have proven throughout history to be a force to be reckoned with at every turn. From Catherine the Great to Rosa Parks and Amelia Earhart, women have left their mark.
Today, there are numerous female moguls taking the business world by storm and making a fortune for themselves while they’re at it.
Let’s take a look at the 10 youngest and richest self-made women of 2022 to find out about their accomplishments and how they made their fortune at such a young age.
10. Emma Grede
Age: 39
Net worth: $360 million
Emma Grede has worked with almost every member of the Kardashian-Jenner family. Grede founded her fashion and entertainment marketing agency, ITB Worldwide, in 2008 and shortly after became the first black woman to serve as an investor on Shark Tank, which skyrocketed her career and fame.
Grede utilizes her expertise in a number of areas. She is currently the CEO of Good American, a fashion brand she launched with Khloe Kardashian in 2016 focused on including all shapes and sizes. She is also a founding partner and chief product officer, of Skims, Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand. Additionally, she is a cofounder of a plant-based cleaning brand called Safely with Kris Jenner. The sky is the limit for Emma Grede!
9. Huda Kattan
Age: 38
Net worth: $400 million
Huda Kattan truly is the epitome of starting over and making something of yourself from nothing. She quit her job in finance back in 2010 to pursue a career in the beauty industry; she started a blog, become a makeup artist and grew her Instagram following which now sits at about 50 million followers.
In 2013, she launched a beauty line called Huda Beauty with her two sisters. Today, Huda Beauty brings in about $200 million in annual sales, showing us all that Kattan’s leap of faith paid off big in the end!
8. Neha Narkhede
Age: 37
Net worth: $490 million
A true story of starting at the bottom and moving up the ladder is that of Neha Narkhede. She started as a software engineer at LinkedIn where she helped invent an open-source software platform called Apache Kafka which helped process the site’s incoming data. From there she went on to co-found the streaming platform, Confluent in 2014.
Her platform now builds Kafka tools for large organizations such as Goldman Sachs, Netflix and Uber, standing as a $388 million revenue organization. Today, she holds the titles of co-founder and former chief technology officer of Confluent and Narkhede with her family owning 8% of the company. She’s now spending her time enjoying the fruits of her labors.
7. Maria Sharapova
Age: 35
Net worth: $220 million
Russian-born tennis legend, Maria Sharapova, is well known around the sport circle with her many singles and five Grand Slam titles. She held the title of the highest-paid female athlete in the world for 11 consecutive years, building up her fortune from the beginning as an athlete and then venturing out into the business world.
In 2012, Sharapova capitalized on her personal brand and launched her candy business, Sugarpova, in an effort to create high-quality treats. She still owns 100% of this business today.
Sharapova has stakes in Public.com and MoonPay and took a board seat with a fashion company - the Moncler Group. While she officially retired from tennis in 2020, that hasn’t stopped her from earning her fortune!
6. Rihanna
Age: 34
Net worth: $1.4 billion
While we may know Rihanna mostly for her music and chart-topping songs like Diamonds and Umbrella, that took the world by storm, she earned her fortune from Fenty Beauty.
She is not only a singer and actress, but also an entrepreneur and that keeps her net worth climbing. She owns 50% of Fenty Beauty coupled with a 30% stake in the Savage x Fenty lingerie line.
Rihanna hasn’t stopped making music though; her ninth album is set to drop at some point in 2022. You can’t blame the woman for being busy with all her other ventures!
5. Rachel Carlson
Age: 33
Net worth: $500 million
Perhaps one of the most ingenious women in the world, Rachel Carlson, found a gap in the education industry and filled it with her Denver-based edtech company.Education can be expensive; Carlson saw that need and capitalized on it by co-founding Guild Education in 2015 with her former classmate Brittan Stich. Carlson now sits as the CEO.
Although the pandemic was a scary time, companies like Walmart and Chipotle continued to focus on investing in the education of their workers and Carlson saw that need and provided an opportunity. Her organization negotiates tuition discounts and facilitates direct payments between employers and schools to make low-cost education possible for them and accessible for all. Rachel Carlson, proved she is a true force to be reckoned with.
4. Taylor Swift
Age: 32
Net worth: $570 million
While Taylor Swift is one of the highest-paid singers in the industry, what truly set her apart was her surprise release of her album Folklore in July 2020, leading to 1.2 million sales. Shortly after that, in December of the same year, she surprise-released Evermore and shocked the world again.
These two albums alone made Taylor $23.8 million in 2020 alone, earning her a spot on the youngest self-made women list. We can safely say that her fame and fortune will only continue to grow.
3. Whitney Wolfe Herd
Age: 32
Net worth: $740 million
If you're out there in the dating world, you might have come across Whitney Wolfe Herd’s app, Bumble. Similar to her “take charge” lifestyle, Bumble is a dating app where women make the first move, and that’s exactly what Wolfe Herd did when she partnered with Russian billionaire, Andrey Andreev, founder of Badoo, in 2014 to bring her vision to life.
She currently owns a 21% stake in Bumble which operates in 150 countries with 3 million paying users, and sits as cofounder and CEO of Bumble Inc., which manages both Bumble and Badoo.
2. Lucy Guo
Age: 27
Net worth: $440 million
At only 22 years old, Lucy Guo dominated the world of tech after joining forces with the world’s youngest billionaire, Alexandr Wang, to co-found Scale AI, an artificial intelligence firm now worth $7.3 billion. She also co-founded early-stage venture firm in 2019, Backend Capital.
In April 2022, Guo launched a new startup company called Moment where she currently serves as the CEO.
1. Kylie Jenner
Age: 24
Net worth: $600 million
On the top of our list of the youngest self-made women is Kylie Jenner. The founder of Kylie Cosmetics and a member of the Kardashian-Jenner family earned her fame by appearing in her family’s reality TV show before pursuing her business.
Kylie started her solo career as a model and took those earnings to invest in herself in 2015 when she launched a line of lip kits that sold out almost immediately. This skyrocketed her career helping her launch Kylie Cosmetics officially.
Kylie sold 51% of her cosmetic line in January 2020 to publicly traded Coty Inc. As of today, she still owns about 44% of Kylie Cosmetics, allowing her to maintain her title as the youngest self-made woman with a net worth of over $600 million.
Want to learn more about Kylie Jenner's path to success? Check out our video:
Final thoughts
If these women have shown us anything, it’s that you don’t have to wait your entire life to be successful; finding fame and fortune is possible at a young age. If you want something bad enough then you must put in the work and go for it!
Which of these success stories do you find the most inspiring? Let us know in the comments section below!