
Here's How Much Selena Gomez-Actress, Singer, Entrepreneur-Is Worth
Over the weekend, Forbes published a report about financial issues at Wondermind, a mental health startup cofounded by actress and business mogul Selena Gomez, which failed to pay its employees, freelancers and vendors in recent weeks. Then on Monday, a source with knowledge of the situation confirmed that nine employees were laid off and given two weeks severance, leaving just four remaining.
Forbes' reporting revealed that the startup, which Gomez founded in 2021 with her mom Mandy Teefey and newsletter entrepreneur Daniella Pierson (who left in 2023), owed tens of thousands of dollars – if not more – in outstanding debts, which the company says it has since repaid. In a recorded conversation shared with Forbes, Teefey, who is also Wondermind's CEO, told employees that she'd taken out a loan against her own home to keep the struggling startup afloat.
Not surprisingly, the news of trouble at Wondermind set off a heated debate online: How much can Gomez really be worth, if a startup she cofounded can't pay its workers or its bills?
In September 2024, Bloomberg reported Gomez' net worth to be $1.3 billion thanks to her makeup line, Rare Beauty, which was founded in 2019 and launched in 2020. Multiple media outlets have since called the 32-year-old Gomez a billionaire as well.
Based on Forbes' reporting, Gomez is very wealthy, but estimated to be worth roughly $700 million. This figure still ranks the former Disney Star among the wealthiest self-made women entrepreneurs in the country – and one of the richest celebrities – but the breakdown of her fortune helps explain why she may be somewhat limited in how much money she can or is willing to sink into Wondermind.
Gomez's biggest asset is her estimated 51% stake in Rare Beauty. The only other known investors in Rare Beauty are private equity firm New Theory Ventures, founded by Nikki Eslami, and Rare Beauty's CEO, Scott Friedman. CEO of the company since its founding, Friedman previously led fellow self-made woman list member Toni Ko's NYX Cosmetics until 2017, when he helped her sell it to L'Oréal for $500 million. A 2021 filing with the city of Southaven, Mississippi, lists Gomez's holding companies, Eslami and Friedman as partners in Rare Beauty LLC. It also names Julius Salerno, cofounder of Eslami's former hair extensions company Bellami, though it is unclear whether he holds a stake. (Eslami and Friedman didn't reply to requests for comment; Salerno couldn't be reached for comment.)
The cosmetics firm sells its offerings exclusively at Sephora and through the Rare Beauty website. It became a hit in large part due to the popularity of its liquid blushes. In a California state filing, Rare Beauty reported $367 million in revenue in 2023, the most recent year for which the information is available. Overall, Forbes values the company at about $1.3 billion based on feedback from beauty industry analysts, who recommended competitive multiples to take into account the company's growth in 2024 but did note that valuations have fallen in recent months.
'The market condition right now is exerting a sort of downward pressure on valuation,' notes Morningstar analyst Dan Su. 'And honestly, makeup is a category in my view, where the entry barrier is relatively low. So there's a lot of competition.'
Outside of Rare Beauty, Gomez has reaped an estimated $90 million in gross earnings over the years from her TV shows, music, brand endorsements and tours. That includes a reported $30 million she got from her 2017 collaboration with Puma and an estimated $24 million for her earnings from Hulu's Emmy-winning comedy series 'Only Murders in the Building,' which she executive produces and stars in, alongside Steve Martin and Martin Short. She also had a prominent role in the Oscar-nominated film 'Emilia Pérez,' for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe for best supporting actress in a motion picture. And she executive produced the controversial hit Netflix series '13 Reasons Why.'
Rare Beauty's most popular product is its "Soft Pinch" blush.
© 2023 Bloomberg Finance LP
In 2020, Gomez paid nearly $5 million for her home in Encino, where she filmed the first three seasons of her cooking show, 'Selena + Chef.' Most recently, she bought a $35 million Beverly Hills property with fiancé and music producer Benny Blanco. Representatives for Gomez declined to comment on Forbes' breakdown of her net worth.
Gomez, now 32, began her career at age 10 when she was cast to play Gianna on the series 'Barney and Friends' from 2002 to 2004. Her big break came three years later, in 2007, when she landed the lead role as Alex Russo in Disney Channel's 'Wizards of Waverly Place.'
Like many former Disney stars, Gomez pivoted to music. She released her first album in 2008 and has released six more since then. Her most recent is a collaboration with Blanco, dropped in March. Still, Gomez, who hasn't done a music tour since 2016, has not pulled in as much cash as some other wealthy entertainers–such as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé–who have pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars over the years, specifically from touring, according to Forbes' estimates.
It's unclear how much of her own money Gomez has put into Wondermind over the years. In 2022, a year after its launch, the company raised $5 million at a $100 million valuation in a Series A funding round led by Serena Williams' Serena Ventures, with participation from the family office of real estate billionaire Barry Sternlicht. (Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Ventures were also listed in PitchBook and other media reports as investors, but on Monday both firms told Forbes that was not accurate).
Wondermind has struggled to secure additional outside funding in the years since. According to one former employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Teefey told this person that she and Gomez had put $8 million of their own money into the company, as of mid-2023. More recently Teefey told employees that the company was close to closing a Series B funding round, but that has not come through.
It all came to a head on March 31, when employees did not get their paycheck and received an email saying that their health benefits had been terminated two weeks earlier. The company missed payroll again on April 30, and at a May 8 staff meeting, Teefey said she had taken out a loan against her home to help cover debts. All of that led to the layoffs on Monday, which a spokesperson for Wondermind said had 'nothing to do with' multiple employees speaking to Forbes previously about the company's financial struggles.
Meanwhile Gomez, who some employees say was barely involved with the mental health startup, is keeping up with her own busy schedule. She has been filming the fifth season of 'Only Murders in the Building' in New York City and focusing on Rare Beauty. On May 2, Gomez, who has 420 million Instagram followers, posted that she surprised attendees after showing up at Rare Beauty's Mental Health Summit held in Los Angeles.
While she's still very much involved in the makeup company, industry experts predict its success will go beyond Gomez's celebrity power. Says Ashleigh Barker, head of beauty and personal care at investment banking advisory firm Lincoln International:
'The fact that it's not the Selena Gomez beauty brand, that it's Rare Beauty and stands for something that very much aligns with Selena and her narrative and messaging to her followers, but also extends well beyond her as an individual… That the brand can stand on its own two feet without her at the helm, I think is what helps create the staying power.'
As for Gomez, there is no doubt after 22 years in the business and success in so many areas, including a huge, loyal fan base, that she likely has other chapters ahead.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Fast Company
23 minutes ago
- Fast Company
‘We're on the cusp of more widespread adoption': Laura Shin on Trump, stablecoins, and the global rise of cryptocurrency
With the first family actively engaged in memecoin ventures, speculation about the future of cryptocurrency has never been hotter. Laura Shin, crypto expert and host of the podcast Unchained, reveals the sector's emerging economic, political, and geopolitical implications. Shin also provides context for why stablecoins are growing so fast and how the current administration is shaping the conversation. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today's top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You call yourself a no-hype crypto journalist, so can you give us a short, no-hype overview of where we are right now in crypto's evolution? Yeah, I would say we're probably on the cusp of more widespread adoption. The number-one biggest reason is simply that the Trump administration is really embracing crypto. That has not been true of previous administrations. In fact, the Biden administration was probably, I want to say, actively hostile. I don't know if people will love that term, but that's probably a pretty accurate description. For a long time, there were a lot of entrepreneurs who were cautious about doing things in the U.S. This administration is more, not only open-minded, but even in some regards almost a little bit too embracing of crypto, you could say. I think there's going to be probably a decent number of crypto IPOs this year, but then on top of it, stablecoins are probably the first major application that has really found what the industry likes to call product-market fit. We're seeing that stablecoins have a huge amount of uptake, especially in so many other jurisdictions where they don't trust their local currency. It could be Argentina or Venezuela or Turkey or Nigeria. There are just a lot of places where people don't actually have a great way to save their money, and they maybe don't also have really great ways to send money across borders. So, stablecoins are fulfilling that role and Congress is probably on the cusp of finally passing legislation here in the U.S. around stablecoins. For a layperson, someone not engaged in the crypto world, can you just explain what a stablecoin is relative to a memecoin, relative to whatever the portfolio might look like? Yeah, so a stablecoin is any blockchain-based asset that is pegged to the value of some other asset—99% of all stablecoins are pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. The way that stablecoins really took off initially was that on a number of crypto exchanges, people wanted to be able to buy and trade using dollars. I wrote this book called The Cryptopians, and it covers 2013 until 2018. Even at that time, people would recite back to me the price of Bitcoin or the price of Ether in dollars. No matter whether they were European or Asian or just wherever they were in the world, they always knew the price in dollars. . . . Here's a really simple example: There's a serial entrepreneur in Afghanistan. Her name is Roya Mahboob, and she had this microblogging platform, and I think a lot of the people writing for it were women. They had a hard time paying them, because a lot of women in Afghanistan, they don't have bank accounts, or if they do, then their male relatives might actually take the money that they earned from them. So [the platform] set them up with Bitcoin wallets and then taught them how to use them. One of the women was in an abusive marriage and saved up the Bitcoin and then used that to eventually divorce her husband, so that gives you some kind of agency. I have some close Turkish friends, and I think it was in 2018, the value of the lira was just going down and down. So it's like people in those places I think grasp these kinds of things a lot more quickly, like the value of crypto. Having a form of money that isn't influenced by a central bank, that's stablecoins. Because the stablecoins are generally linked to the U.S. dollar, it's a way to sort of have dollars without having dollars, right? Exactly. I mean, you're getting the stability of that U.S. market, which there's some irony in that, because of course one of the philosophical ideas around crypto is that it's not linked to a government, that it's separate. Now we're going to get really deep into this. So you're correct that this is people wanting U.S. dollars, which is a form of currency linked to a specific government, but of course the people who want those dollars are people who don't otherwise have the privilege of easily accessing them. Bitcoin, of course, existed before stablecoins ever existed. There have been times when the Bitcoin price would go up, and then it would crash for a little while, and then it would go up again and then it would crash, and so that's kind of when you started to see stablecoins also take off. A lot of people view Bitcoin as a good long-term investment, but on any short-term timescale, you don't really know where the price is going to be, so if you need the money on a shorter-term timescale, then you would probably rather have something more stable, and so that's where the interest in stablecoins came about. There's a reason why 99% of the stablecoins are denominated or pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar, and it's of course because we're the global reserve currency, so there's a lot of safety there. Trump seems like he's done a full 180 on crypto. I mean, he said it was a scam during his first term and then supported it very strongly in his campaign. He's launched his own Trump coin three days before the inauguration. Do we know how much of Trump's crypto position is about political opportunity or financial opportunity, or some larger philosophy about markets? I don't think there's a larger philosophy. I think most people probably know what Trump's MO is. But let's just say he's president and he took a luxury jetliner from the Qataris, so whatever it is that you think that says about him, it applies to his activities in the crypto world. What I will say though, aside from his personal dealings, which by and large in my opinion, they're business dealings, things that would help his family or him. He launches this memecoin, which by the way, to make one of these things costs almost no money, so I just want to make that clear, and you're basically printing money out of thin air, right? But then on top of that, the people who got in very early, they just had some agreement where they had to hold their coins until whatever it was, 90 days or I forget what the number of days was. Now, fortuitously, when that deadline came, [Trump] announced that he was going to have a dinner, and in order to participate in the dinner, you had to be one of the top holders of this coin, so of course the price shot up right at that time when this unlock was happening for those insiders. Just note the timing there and put those two facts together and you can make your own conclusions, but, well, let me put it this way: Trump saw that the Biden administration alienated the crypto community. He realized these people have money and they hate the Democrats. . . . He said, 'I'm the crypto candidate,' and he even went to the Bitcoin conference last year. He made all these promises to the crypto community and Bitcoin communities. On top of that, people in his personal orbit, his family, realized this industry is going to get bigger, this industry's all about money, and so they have been taking advantage. So you will see, and this is very interesting, there were a number of people who were very passionately pro-Trump during the campaign, and then once the memecoin thing happened, because not only Trump, but also Melania launched a memecoin, and they were not happy about what he was doing. It was reported that their company, World Liberty Financial, was doing deals with different token teams where basically they were just exchanging money. 'I'll give you this amount of money if you buy the World Liberty Financial token, and we'll buy this amount of your token. I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine.' But people in the industry also kind of look down on that, because it's not organic.


Bloomberg
29 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Oil Edges Lower as Traders Take Stock of Mideast Tension
The Opening Trade Oil prices edged lower -- after jumping more than 4% on Wednesday -- as traders tracked tensions in the Middle East and the latest moves in US trade policy. Bloomberg's Anthony DiPaola reports. (Source: Bloomberg)


Forbes
32 minutes ago
- Forbes
U.S. Futures Drop As Trump Says He'll Set Unilateral Tariffs In 2 Weeks
U.S. stock futures slumped early on Thursday—with the Dow index dropping by more than 200 points—after President Donald Trump said his administration will soon send letters to other countries unilaterally outlining the tariff rates that will be imposed on them. U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media during a guided tour of the John F. Kennedy Center ... More for the Performing Arts. While attending a show at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday evening, Trump was asked about extending the ongoing 90-day tariff pause—which will expire on July 9—and said: 'I would, but I don't think we're going to have that necessity.' The president said the U.S. was negotiating with 15 countries, including Japan and South Korea. Trump then noted that the U.S. has around '150 plus' trading partners and 'at a certain point, we're just going to send letters out…saying this is the deal, you can take it or leave it.' 'We're going to be sending letters out in about a week and a half, two weeks, to countries, telling them what the deal is,' he added. The president touted the proposed agreement with China as a 'great deal,' adding, 'We're very happy with it, we have everything we need.' U.S. stock futures slumped in premarket trading early Thursday, with the benchmark S&P 500 slipping by 0.4% to 6,004 points. The Dow Futures index was the worst hit, dropping by 0.5% to 42,684 points, while the tech-focused Nasdaq Futures fell 0.4% to 21,799 points.