The influencer’s corporate ownership is hidden from audiences behind a single persona
Evidence
The main point we’re making in documenting the ownership of Jeffree Star Cosmetics and Killer Merch is simple: Star is one of several individuals involved in building a significant corporate structure that is intentionally hidden from the view of his audience, a corporate structure that only begins to become evident when Star’s warehouse comes into view. Even though, in “Secret World,” Star claims that he is these businesses, taking some form of public responsibility for all their operations, he is one of a small group of people who maintain ownership and control of a shifting and shadowy group of loosely connected LLCs. Star is distinct from his businesses, though—like we saw in the past with the suturing of image and person, of person and property. Star attempts to both legally and publicly veil his many companies while at the same time rendering them visible as a signifier of excess, of wealth. And this public obscurity is not just in terms of what is visible on YouTube. Through the limitations of oversight on LLCs—not to mention LLCs managed by lawyers—public visibility has consequences for is governmental and legal regulation. The unstable network of ownership, claimed by Star on YouTube but obfuscated beyond the minimal public legal documentation required by the state of California, is the very thing also hidden in the vast majority of Star’s videos. We may see the interiors of his gaudy house, of his expensive, luxury cars, but until “The Secret World of Jeffree Star,” the network of corporate ownership undergirding Star’s financial security had been completely obscured. Star is one product manufactured, sold, and shipped by the warehouse that points toward his vertically integrated existence. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 304
Categorization
- XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s Corpocene framework: Star is the product, not the owner — the self-as-firm inverted, echoing the earlier corporate-personhood material.
- ADDENDUM: Supports ‘the self becomes the firm’ thesis with a concrete case study of LLC veiling behind one public persona.