• Kylie Jenner, 21, is the youngest self-made billionaire, Forbes reported on Tuesday.
  • Forbes estimated that Kylie Cosmetics, the company she runs and owns, is worth $900 million. That and the cash she has already pulled in from the business brings her to billionaire status, Forbes said.
  • Experts have said the key to her success is her well-executed social-media strategy: She has more than 175 million followers across the platforms she uses to market her products.

Kylie Jenner is officially the youngest self-made billionaire.

After saying last year that Jenner was on her way to becoming a billionaire, Forbes reported on Tuesday that the 21-year-old had finally achieved billionaire status thanks to 9% revenue growth in her $900 million business, Kylie Cosmetics, in 2018, fueled by a partnership with Ulta that brought her products to its more than 1,000 US stores.

“Add in the cash Jenner has already pulled from the profitable business, and the 21-year-old is now a billionaire, with an estimated fortune of $1 billion,” the Forbes reporter Natalie Robehmed wrote. “She’s the youngest-ever self-made billionaire, reaching a ten-figure fortune at a younger age than even Mark Zuckerberg (who was 23 when he hit that mark).”

Jenner made her foray into cosmetics in 2015 when she starting selling lip kits, with lipsticks and lip liners. They sold out in less than a minute.

Several months later, she launched Kylie Cosmetics on Shopify with 500,000 lip kits in six colors. By the end of 2016, the company had generated $307 million in revenue, INSIDER reported.

Experts have said the key to her success is her well-executed social-media strategy: She has more than 175 million followers across the platforms she uses to market her products, Forbes said.

The business overhead is low. According to Forbes, Jenner has a team of seven full-time and five part-time employees, while manufacturing and packaging are done by a local company in California, the sales and fulfillment are handled by Shopify, and her mother, Kris Jenner, handles finance and public relations for a 10% management fee.

Kylie Jenner was on the cover of Forbes' "America's Women Billionaires" issue in August, when the magazine reported that she was the 27th-richest self-made woman in the United States.

Many took issue with Forbes classifying Jenner as a "self-made" near-billionaire, saying that being born into extreme wealth and fame is the opposite of being "self-made."

Read more: People are slamming Forbes for putting Kylie Jenner on its list of the richest 'self-made' women

Even Dictionary.com got involved: