Personal controversy can be converted into a billion-dollar commercial brand

Evidence

The Kardashians raised this business model into global prominence. Kendall Jenner earned $26.5 million in 2018 for posting products. The youngest spawn, Kylie Jenner, denied getting cosmetic surgery on her lips for years—a lie. She then turned the controversy into a company, Kylie Cosmetics, that sold twenty-nine-dollar “lip kits.” Her brand inked a giant distribution deal with beauty retailer Ulta, and in 2019, Forbes honored her as the “youngest-ever self-made billionaire”—beating Zuckerberg by two years. (This was also based on a lie: Forbes retracted the title after discovering that Jenner fudged the numbers.) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 550

Categorization

• XREF: Building the omnivore monoculture argument: Kylie Jenner is a case study in content/identity flattening, where the controversy IS the product — nothing signals except success itself.