Ibusiness, timing is everything—even for the rich and famous. The boom time for celebrity entrepreneurship took off like a rocket around the end of 2020, and the pop stars, actors and talk show hosts who best took advantage minted fortunes in the hundreds of millions, even billions in a few cases, by putting their name on everything from cosmetics brands to TV and movie production companies. But now they, like many others, are feeling the effects of a cooling economy.
On Forbes’ list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women this year, 16 celebrities rank among the 100 entrepreneurs, executives and entertainers. In order to make the cut, candidates had to be worth at least $350 million—up from $300 million last year and $225 million in 2023.
These stars of the stage and screen are collectively worth $14.1 billion, up from $13.3 billion last year—thanks to the addition of actress Selena Gomez (No. 48), who isn’t yet a billionaire but whose estimated $700 million net worth makes up almost the entirety of that difference. Most of the other 15 stars’ fortunes are little changed from a year ago.
Gomez launched her cosmetics company Rare Beauty at the start of the celebrity business boom, in September 2020, and it disclosed $367 million in revenue by 2023. Similarly, Judy Sheindlin (No. 61) signed a mega deal in late 2020 to move her eponymous TV arbitration show to Amazon Prime; pop star Rihanna (No. 35) raised money for her Savage x Fenty lingerie brand at a $1 billion valuation in early 2021; Madonna (No. 42) signed a lucrative new deal with Warner Music that summer; and, perhaps most notably, movie star Reese Witherspoon (No. 82) sold a majority stake in her production company Hello Sunshine in August 2021 at a reported $900 million valuation.
The Hello Sunshine sale is now referenced regularly throughout Hollywood as the peak of a celebrity production bubble. At the time of the acquisition by Blackstone-backed Candle Media, the company projected $80 million in profit by 2023. But according to an October 2023 report in Bloomberg, it produced less than $10 million that year, and the pace of new productions has only continued to slow in the two years since. As of 2025, Forbes estimates Hello Sunshine is worth less than a third of its sale price. (A representative for Witherspoon disagreed with Forbes, but offered no guidance.)