Kimberly Noel Kardashian is an American media personality, businesswoman, and law student whose two-decade public career began with reality television and has evolved into one of the most closely studied wealth-building stories in celebrity business.
She and her family became global household names through Keeping Up with the Kardashians, which ran on E! from 2007 to 2021, but her most significant and lasting commercial success has come through SKIMS, the shapewear and apparel company she co-founded in 2019, which reached a $5 billion valuation in November 2025.
Her roughly one-third ownership stake in that company forms the core of a fortune that pushed her past billionaire status, according to Forbes, making her one of relatively few celebrities to build a personal fortune primarily through equity ownership rather than salary or endorsement income alone.
Quick Facts
| Quick Fact | Details |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Kimberly Noel Kardashian |
| Date of Birth | October 21, 1980 |
| Age | 46 years, 4 days |
| Place of Birth | Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Profession | Media personality, businesswoman, law student |
| Known For | Keeping Up with the Kardashians; SKIMS; criminal justice reform advocacy |
| Years Active | 2006 to present |
| Education | Marymount High School, Los Angeles; briefly attended Pierce College and USC; studying law through California’s apprenticeship pathway |
| Spouse/Partner | Divorced from Damon Thomas, Kris Humphries, and Kanye West; relationship status as of 2026 not consistently confirmed across sources |
| Children | Four with Kanye West: North, Saint, Chicago, and Psalm |
| Net Worth | Estimated between $1.7 billion and $2 billion as of 2026 (see Net Worth section) |
Who Is Kim Kardashian?
Kim Kardashian is an American businesswoman and media personality who first entered public consciousness in the mid-2000s and has since built one of the more unusual and well-documented paths to significant personal wealth among modern celebrities. Following the 2007 premiere of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, a reality series chronicling her family’s daily lives, she became one of the most recognizable figures in American popular culture, leveraging that visibility into a series of business ventures spanning mobile gaming, cosmetics, and eventually shapewear and apparel.
Her most significant venture, SKIMS, which she co-founded with Jens Grede in 2019, has grown into a multibillion-dollar company and now represents the substantial majority of her personal net worth. Beyond business, Kardashian has pursued a legal education through California’s apprenticeship pathway to bar admission, using that platform to engage directly in criminal justice reform advocacy, including work that contributed to the 2018 clemency of Alice Marie Johnson.
Early Life and Childhood
Kimberly Noel Kardashian was born on October 21, 1980, in Los Angeles, California, the second of four children born to Robert Kardashian, an attorney, and Kris Kardashian (later Kris Jenner), who went on to manage her children’s careers. Her father gained national recognition in 1995 as a member of O.J. Simpson’s defense team during his murder trial. Kim was raised in Los Angeles alongside her older sister, Kourtney, and younger siblings Khloé and Rob.
Her parents divorced in 1989, and her mother married Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner, who later transitioned and is now known as Caitlyn Jenner; that marriage added two more siblings, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, to the family. Kardashian grew up in a comfortable, celebrity-adjacent environment in Los Angeles and was a preschool classmate of hotel heiress Paris Hilton, a childhood friendship that would later prove significant to her early career.
Education
Kardashian attended Marymount High School, a private Roman Catholic all-girls school in Los Angeles, graduating in 1998. She subsequently enrolled at Pierce College before transferring to the University of Southern California, but left after a single semester to pursue opportunities in entertainment rather than complete a degree.
Decades later, Kardashian returned to formal study, pursuing a legal education through California’s four-year law office study apprenticeship program, an alternative path to bar admission that does not require attending law school. She passed the state’s “baby bar” examination in 2021 after multiple attempts, a required early milestone in that program, but did not pass the full California bar examination in her July 2025 attempt, and remained in the process of completing her legal studies as of early 2026.
How Kim Kardashian Started Her Career
Kardashian’s earliest professional work was largely behind the scenes, styling and organizing closets for clients within Los Angeles’s entertainment industry, work that built on connections established partly through her friendship with Paris Hilton, for whom she also served as a personal assistant beginning in the early 2000s. This period placed her within Hollywood’s social and celebrity circles without yet establishing her as a public figure in her own right.
Kardashian’s move into wider public visibility followed the early 2007 leak of a private video, filmed years earlier with her then-boyfriend Ray J, which was distributed without her consent. The circumstances generated significant tabloid attention, and later that year, Kardashian and her family launched Keeping Up with the Kardashians on the E! network, a series that would run for 20 seasons over the following fourteen years and transform Kardashian from a tabloid figure into an entertainment franchise unto herself.
Breakthrough and Rise to Fame
Keeping Up with the Kardashians became one of E!’s signature programs, spawning multiple spinoff series, including Kourtney and Kim Take Miami and Kourtney and Kim Take New York, and establishing the extended Kardashian-Jenner family as a fixture of American popular culture through the 2010s. The show’s success gave Kardashian a sustained media platform well beyond what the initial 2007 controversy alone would have provided, and she used that visibility to build an increasingly ambitious set of business ventures over the following decade.
A notable early example came in 2014, when her mobile game, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, became one of the highest-grossing titles on the Apple App Store, reportedly earning $1.6 million in its first week alone, before it was eventually shut down in 2024. The game’s success was an early demonstration that Kardashian’s personal brand could generate significant revenue independent of the reality series that had made her famous.
Career
Following the initial success of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kardashian expanded into television hosting and judging roles, including a stint as a judge on America’s Next Top Model and an appearance on Dancing with the Stars, alongside minor acting roles that did not develop into a sustained film or television acting career. Her more consequential professional evolution came through business: she launched KKW Beauty, a cosmetics line known for its contour products, in 2017, generating $100 million in revenue in its first year, and later sold a 20 percent stake in the beauty business to Coty in 2020 at a $1 billion valuation, a transaction that provided one of her first major nine-figure liquidity events.
KKW Beauty was later discontinued and rebranded as SKKN by Kim, a luxury skincare line; in June 2025, SKIMS repurchased the 20 percent stake Coty had held in that skincare business, consolidating it fully under the SKIMS umbrella ahead of a planned 2026 relaunch as SKIMS Beauty. In 2022, Keeping Up with the Kardashians ended after 20 seasons, and the family transitioned to a new series, The Kardashians, on Hulu, continuing to document the family’s lives, including the ongoing growth of Kardashian’s business ventures.
Business Ventures and Endorsements
Kardashian co-founded SKIMS with entrepreneur Jens Grede in 2019, and the company has grown rapidly since, raising capital across several funding rounds that valued the company at $1.6 billion in 2021, $3.2 billion in 2022, $4 billion following a 2023 Series C round, and $5 billion following a $225 million round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives and BDT & MSD Partners in November 2025. Kardashian owns approximately 35 percent of the company, a stake that, at the company’s most recent valuation, is worth an estimated $1.67 billion to $1.75 billion on paper, though this figure reflects private company equity rather than a publicly traded, independently verified market price. SKIMS crossed $1 billion in annual net sales in 2025, and in early 2026 the company launched NikeSkims, an activewear partnership with Nike that debuted with the NikeSkims Rift sneaker.
Kardashian’s earlier ventures include D-A-S-H, a clothing boutique she operated with her sisters Kourtney and Khloé, and KKW Fragrance, a perfume line. She has also earned substantial income from paid social media endorsements, reportedly commanding between $300,000 and $1 million per sponsored Instagram post. These endorsement relationships are distinct from her direct ownership positions in SKIMS and her earlier KKW ventures, and should not be conflated with equity ownership.
Awards and Achievements
Keeping Up with the Kardashians won multiple Teen Choice Awards and a People’s Choice Award over the course of its run, recognition tied to the show’s sustained popularity rather than individual acting or artistic achievement. Kardashian’s more substantive professional recognition has come through her business ventures, with SKIMS’ rapid valuation growth and her 2021 inclusion on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list, initially driven by the success of her mobile game, marking early formal acknowledgment of her business acumen distinct from her reality television fame.
Forbes first confirmed Kardashian’s billionaire status in April 2021, driven substantially by the Coty transaction and SKIMS’ early valuation growth, and as of March 2026 ranked her at approximately eighth place on its World’s Celebrity Billionaires list.
Personal Life
Kim Kardashian has been married three times. She eloped with music producer Damon Thomas in a secret 2000 Las Vegas wedding; the marriage ended in divorce in 2004. In August 2011, following a widely televised wedding, she married NBA player Kris Humphries, a marriage that lasted just 72 days before Kardashian filed for divorce, though the divorce itself was not finalized until 2013 due to Humphries’s initial contest of the filing.
Kardashian began a relationship with musician and designer Kanye West in 2012, and the couple married in Florence, Italy, in May 2014. They have four children together: North, born in 2013; Saint, born in 2015; Chicago, born in 2018; and Psalm, born in 2019. Kardashian filed for divorce from West in February 2021, and the divorce was finalized in November 2022. Following her divorce, she was in a confirmed nine-month relationship with comedian Pete Davidson, from late 2021 to August 2022, and was later linked in media reports to NFL player Odell Beckham Jr. As of 2026, reporting on Kardashian’s relationship status has been inconsistent: some outlets have described her as dating Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton, while other reporting around the same period quoted her describing herself as single and content; given this inconsistency, her current relationship status should be treated as unconfirmed rather than established fact.
Family
Kardashian’s mother, Kris Jenner, has served as her manager and the broader family’s business strategist throughout her career. Her siblings, Kourtney Kardashian, Khloé Kardashian, and Rob Kardashian, along with half-sisters Kendall Jenner and Kylie Jenner, have each built their own public and, in several cases, business careers, and the extended family has continued to be documented collectively through The Kardashians on Hulu. Kardashian shares custody of her four children with her ex-husband, Kanye West.
Kim Kardashian Net Worth
Kim Kardashian’s net worth is estimated between $1.7 billion and $2 billion as of 2026, according to differing estimates from Forbes and Celebrity Net Worth, with the variation reflecting differing approaches to valuing her SKIMS equity, a private company stake without a publicly traded share price. Forbes placed her net worth at approximately $1.9 billion as of March 2026, up from $1.7 billion in May 2025, while Celebrity Net Worth has estimated a figure closer to $2 billion.
The substantial majority of her wealth is concentrated in her roughly one-third ownership stake in SKIMS, valued at an estimated $1.67 billion to $1.75 billion following the company’s $5 billion November 2025 valuation. Secondary contributors include proceeds from her 2020 sale of a 20 percent KKW Beauty stake to Coty, television-related income from Keeping Up with the Kardashians and The Kardashians, paid social media endorsements, and real estate holdings. Because SKIMS is a privately held company that does not publish financial statements, all net worth figures for Kardashian should be understood as informed estimates based on the company’s most recent funding-round valuation rather than a precisely known figure.
Social Media and Public Presence
Kardashian maintains a substantial presence across major platforms, including Instagram, where she has one of the largest followings of any public figure, and which she uses regularly to promote SKIMS and other business ventures alongside personal updates. Her social media following has itself functioned as a significant business asset, directly supporting the marketing and brand visibility of her ventures.
Philanthropy and Social Impact
Kardashian has become a prominent advocate for criminal justice reform, most notably through her direct involvement in the case of Alice Marie Johnson, a nonviolent drug offender serving a life sentence, whose 2018 clemency followed Kardashian’s direct advocacy, including a White House meeting with President Trump. This advocacy work has continued alongside her legal studies, which she has stated are intended in part to support continued work in criminal justice reform.
Cultural Impact and Legacy
Kim Kardashian’s career trajectory, from reality television subject to majority owner of a multibillion-dollar private company, has been widely cited within business and media commentary as a distinctive case study in modern celebrity wealth-building, illustrating how sustained public visibility can be converted into durable business ownership rather than remaining dependent on media appearances or endorsement income alone. Her earlier business moves, particularly the strategically timed 2020 sale of a KKW Beauty stake to Coty, are frequently referenced as evidence of a more deliberate business strategy than her earlier tabloid-driven public image suggested.
SKIMS itself has had a broader influence on the shapewear and intimates industry, popularizing extended size ranges and inclusive marketing approaches that have influenced how competitors in the category present their own products. Kardashian’s family’s broader visibility through their television franchises has also been widely discussed as a significant influence on the development of reality television as a genre and on the broader culture of personal-brand-driven social media influence that followed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Kim Kardashian? Kim Kardashian is an American businesswoman and media personality who rose to fame through Keeping Up with the Kardashians and later built SKIMS into a multibillion-dollar company.
How old is Kim Kardashian? She was born on October 21, 1980, in Los Angeles, California.
What is Kim Kardashian famous for? She is famous for Keeping Up with the Kardashians, her SKIMS shapewear and apparel company, and her advocacy for criminal justice reform.
What is Kim Kardashian’s net worth? Estimates for 2026 range from approximately $1.7 billion to $2 billion, with the majority of her wealth tied to her ownership stake in SKIMS.
How many children does Kim Kardashian have? She has four children, North, Saint, Chicago, and Psalm, all with her ex-husband, Kanye West.
Has Kim Kardashian been married? Yes, three times: to Damon Thomas, Kris Humphries, and Kanye West, all ending in divorce.
Does Kim Kardashian own SKIMS? Yes. She co-founded the company with Jens Grede in 2019 and owns approximately one-third of it, following the company’s $5 billion valuation in November 2025.
Is Kim Kardashian a lawyer? Not yet. She is pursuing a legal license through California’s apprenticeship pathway and has passed the “baby bar” but had not passed the full California bar exam as of her most recent attempt in July 2025.
Sources
- Britannica, “Kim Kardashian | Biography, Children, & Facts”
- Forbes, Kim Kardashian net worth profile (2026)
- EBSCO Research Starters, “Kim Kardashian | Biography”
- The Wall Street Journal, SKIMS funding coverage (November 2025)
- Fox News, “Kim Kardashian, Pete Davidson call it quits after 9 months” (2022)
- Hollywood Life, “Who Is Kim Kardashian Dating Now? Look Back at Her Dating History”