Selena Gomez: Actress, singer, beauty mogul

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Okay, it's the summer of 2016 and we're on tour with one of America's biggest pop stars.

Behind the glitz and the glamour of the stage, behind the thunderous applause, the thousands of adoring fans, things are not so picture perfect.

Backstage are meltdowns, insecurity, exhaustion, and outside the arena walls, a hungry press pack that never sleeps, whether it's New York or London or Bangkok, Tokyo, Sydney, no matter where she goes, they're there.

She's small, big glasses firmly on and a hoodie pulled tight, hurried through airport terminals and hotel lobbies, barely looking up, as the camera flashes explode around her, and the praparazzi are, as they always are, ruthless.

Did Justin Bieber make you go to rehab?

Are you jealous of Justin's new girlfriend?

Are you drinking again?

Are you depressed?

They shout anything to provoke, anything to get that headline shot, but our star just keeps walking face blank, head down, and then three months into the tour, she pulls the plug, cancels the rest.

disappears from the spotlight.

The following year, she checks into a rehab facility, and of course the gossip machine kicks into overdrive.

Rumours of her being just another troubled child star wrestling with addiction, too much partying.

But there's more to this story than meets the eye.

Because the woman at the center of the storm is none other than Mexican-American superstar Selena Gomez, and as you'll find out, there's a whole lot more to her rise, her breakdown, and her billion-dollar comeback than the tabloids ever told you.

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Each episode we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money and then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Simon Jack.

I'm the BBC's business editor.

And I'm Zhang Seng, I'm a journalist, author, and podcaster.

And this week, I have to say,

you're going to be leading this one.

Yeah.

This is more in your wheelhouse, as they say in my world than mine.

I'm assuming you're not a Selenator.

Selenator.

I'm never sure how to pronounce that.

Selenator, Selenita?

Yeah.

No.

No.

Well, I...

It's the simple answer.

I actually think Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber, who comes into this story later on, they were like the Britney and Justin of their era.

The Britney and Justin Timberlake.

Exactly.

Okay, got it.

And it's kind of all the same points you'll hit, you know, former child stars, too much partying, breakdowns.

You know, they very much were the kind of tabloid couple of their era.

Okay, so we're going to be talking about Selena Gomez, aged just 32, but already had a long career.

Yeah, she's been in the game for 25 years.

So she's one of our newest billionaires.

She's currently worth 1.3 billion.

By the way, when I told my wife who we were doing this week, and I said Selena Gomez, she literally fell off her chair.

She said, she is a billionaire?

Well, yeah, she is, although a really recent one.

So she only made the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in 2024.

She also claims the title of the most followed woman on Instagram in the world with 421 million followers.

That is wild.

It's more than Kim Kardashian.

That is incredible.

Listen, whether you know the Mexican-American style from her Disney kid days as a singer, award-winning actress, or as a mental health advocate, it's her beauty brand Rare Beauty that made her one of America's youngest female self-made billionaires with more than 80% of her net worth driving from her stake in that company.

Ring some bells with other billionaires we've talked about, in particular Rihanna.

Yes, exactly.

Rihanna with Fenty Beauty.

And, you know, her personal life is also key to understanding that success as a businesswoman.

So we will be covering a lot of that too.

We also watched the Selena Gomez documentary, Selena Gomez, My Mind and Me, which we found a really useful source.

Well, let's go back to the beginning, from zero to a million.

So we're going to go back a little earlier than we usually do before Selena was even born, because this is a really important part of her origin story.

So we're going all the way back to the 1970s and the back of a truck, which is driving across the Mexican-US border.

Selena Gomez's paternal grandparents are actually hidden in the back of that truck.

They are anxiously hoping to make it across the border undetected.

And they do.

Selena's father, Ricardo Joe Gomez, was born in Texas shortly after.

Couldn't be more topical than it is right now, that origin story.

And it would take Selena's paternal grandparents 17 years to gain US citizenship.

Selena remembers.

That was such a huge deal.

My grandpa was working in construction.

He was hiring hundreds of of people and still they were living on the edge, covering up exactly how scary it was.

Ricardo met Selena's mum, Mandy Tifi, in high school and the couple got pregnant at just 16.

So Selena Gomez was born on July 22nd, 1992 in Grand Prairie, Texas.

That's two months after Tejano music icon Selena Quintanilla-Peres released her breakthrough album and these two teen fans couldn't resist naming their daughter after her.

Shades of Things to Come.

Yeah, Selena grew up living with her mum and maternal grandparents in a Mexican-American neighborhood.

And she said about having such young parents, you know, it was hard on me.

They were kids, so we were all growing up together.

But not together for long, because when Selena was five, her parents split up.

Her mum, at that time just 21 years old, held down several jobs to make ends meet.

But Selena said that her mum shielded her from any sense of hardship that was going on.

And her mum, Mandy, also had dreams of her own.

She wanted to be an actress, so she would squeeze in rehearsals for local theatre productions between work shifts.

And then one day, little Selena came along to watch dear old mum.

And according to Mandy, Selena was only about six or seven at the time.

And she sat through this whole rehearsal completely still, transfixed.

And on the way home, she didn't say a lot until suddenly she turned to her mum and said, you know, mum,

you might actually be funnier if you did it that way.

Ouch.

Tough feedback from your kid.

You know, criticism.

Yeah, Selena wasn't just interested in acting, though.

She wanted to be on television specifically.

And it didn't take long for that to happen.

Her first job, a commercial for a restaurant chain called Joe's Crab Shack.

Not exactly glamorous, but you've got to start somewhere, right?

Yep, and Joe's Crab Shack certainly has a claim to fame now.

Yeah.

She also landed something much bigger after that.

So you might remember a certain big purple dinosaur who captivated children from the 90s onwards.

I certainly remember him.

Yeah, me too, actually.

I do remember Barney.

Yeah.

Well, at the age of seven, Selena got a role as Gianna on Barney and Friends, that famous show, the long-running children's TV show on PBS.

He was this rather lovable, goofy, kind of slightly dopey dinosaur, right?

Yes.

Played by a guy in a suit.

Yeah.

And, well, she loved this.

And she once said, I didn't have to live real life.

I could go play in Barney World, dancing, having a great time.

And that thing about not being in the real world, I think it's one of those things that's going to crop up again and again.

Definitely.

Because, you know, while this feels like fun for a kid, it's also serious work.

So Selena reportedly earned around $3,000 per episode, although we can't confirm that figure, but either way, she appeared in 13 episodes in total, which is quite the paycheck for a child under the age of 10.

And get this, by the time she was 10, after two seasons, she'd outgrown the role and was let go.

In her words, I got the boot because I was too old.

Ouch, that is a real lesson for a very young girl to learn.

For sure.

Well, obviously, she had to go back to school, so that wasn't exactly easy either.

Selena described herself as feeling like a bit of an outsider.

So So there were a few small roles after Barney's World or Barney, but most of her time was spent auditioning for a very specific target.

If you're a kid actor, the holy grail, Disney.

Exactly, the big mouse himself.

This, however, is not as glamorous as you might imagine it.

These children do not get flown out on private jets.

Selena and her mum would travel back and forth between their hometown of Texas and LA, often scraping by on whatever Disney's per DM allowance could cover.

At one point, they were living in a one-room loft in downtown LA along with Selena's Barney co-star, Demi Lovato, and her entire family.

Demi Lovato also had her own pop career, although arguably not as big as Selena.

Okay, I know about Selena, I don't know about Demi.

That's the litmus test.

Okay, have heard of, haven't heard of?

This is like when I asked you to explain private equity.

Oh, there we go.

This is my version of private equity, of explaining private equity.

But, you know, let's go back to Selena because the hustle of her mum and her finally pay off.

She lands her first major role, which is starring in a brand new Disney Channel show, Wizards of Waverly Place in 2007.

Now, this show was huge.

She and her mum pack up for good, they leave Texas and they move to LA.

And this show centers on Alex Russo, Selena's character, who's a teenage wizard growing up in New York City.

Her family runs a small restaurant, but behind the scenes in the show, the siblings are in magical training.

One day, only one of them will inherit the family's powers.

It premiered in October 2007 when Selena was just 15.

And you know, I talked about how the show was massive.

Well, it was a hit.

She was everywhere because of the show.

TV, music, movies, merchandise, red carpets.

So Selena's image is constantly being circulated.

And she later told Vogue, that was my job in a way to be perfect.

You are considered a figure that kids look up to, and they take that seriously there.

And as we know, with fame comes scrutiny, massive scrutiny.

And Selena soon experiences the downside of that fame.

She's only 15 years old when Paparazzi started following her, even snapping pictures of her on the beach with family.

Selena remembers, we saw far away grown men with cameras taking pictures of a 15-year-old in her swimsuit.

That's a violating feeling, was what she said at the time.

Yeah, really sobering stuff.

And then there came her first high-profile relationship with another teen star.

of the time, Justin Bieber.

If you remember him, he also made a cameo in our Martha Steele episode.

Yeah, he was on the comeback trail at the time.

He was on the comeback trail, yeah, exactly.

Well, he had this on-again, off-again romance of Selena.

It became a media obsession.

I think the term for it was Jelena.

Jelena.

Jelena.

When we sort of say her first high-profile relationship, pretty hard to have a higher-profile relationship than those two at that time.

You know, exactly.

It was huge.

There were a lot of cryptic posts, Instagram comments.

You know, it was like a kind of breadcrumb trail.

And, you know, Jelena fans would really try and piece this all together to create this grand overarching narrative of were they weren't they were they on again off again well her mum spoke about that period seriously and said you have the added pressure of them under the spotlight they're trying to grow and be themselves and then they don't get to do that free of judgment And in what's become sort of a rite of passage for Disney stars, Selena also launches her music career.

She forms a band called Selena Gomez and the Scene.

Yes, their first album, Kiss and Tell, came out in 2009, following a similar path to her peers, like, for example, Miley Cyrus, who I do know.

Yes.

Okay.

And Sabrina Carpenter.

Sabrina Carpenter.

You might know.

Nope.

Sorry.

Okay.

What about the espresso song?

Come on.

No.

No, okay.

So, I mean, there are always drawbacks to fame, right?

There's rough with smooth.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, Selena achieved what she wanted to do.

She was on television.

She was earning big money as well.

Yeah.

In fact, reports say she was earning between $25,000 and $30,000 per episode, per episode of The Wizards of Waverly Place over four seasons, 106 episodes.

If you do the math, that adds up somewhere between

two and a half and 3.2 million dollars.

Yeah, but we have to remember it's not our take-home pay.

So a lot of that gets eaten up.

There'll be commissions, there'll be taxes, and then there's something called the Coogan account, which is a legal requirement in California where a portion of child actors' earnings have to be put into a trust that they cannot touch until they turn 21.

So when Wizards wrapped up in 2012, Selena Selena still wasn't 21, so the money was there but locked away.

But still, if you want to go by anyone's measure, you know, she is officially a millionaire.

Such an interesting thing, this Coogan account, I think.

In a way, it's quite an enlightened thing to do to sort of basically say, I know that there'll be all sorts of people trying to rip you off at this point.

So let's put some money aside for when you're a bit older.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, it makes sense.

But this road from millionaire to billionaire for Selena came with a lot of public highs and very public lows.

As we will see as we chart her progress from a million to a billion.

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So just a year before Wizards of Waverly Prace wrapped up, 19-year-old Selena decided to put some of her Disney dollars to work by buying her very first home.

We're talking $2.1 million for a little starter mansion in Tusana, California.

So a sprawling estate.

There's six bedrooms, nine bathrooms, sits on a full acre of completely gated cordendoff land.

There's a basketball court and a fruit orchard.

And of course, why not?

Selena added a media room, a card room, an outdoor pool with a spa and a separate guest house later.

Oh, and when she sold it in 2014, she sold it to the Australian rapper Iggy Azealia and NBA player Nick Young.

They were the ones who scooped it up for 3.5 million, which is not actually a bad flip.

But I do also like the idea of a starter mansion.

Yeah.

It implies much bigger and much better coming later on.

So she's clearly making some big grown-up moves here.

She's bought a house, stepping away from her Disney show, but Hollywood's still keeping her in the wholesome tween, as they call it, the tween zone.

So she's popping up in other movies in that genre.

Yeah, I mean, you just look at the titles to know what they're about.

Another Cinderella story, Princess Protection Programme, Ramona and Bezis, and the Muppets.

You know, I have to confess I did not watch a single one of these movies.

I am one of the world's biggest Muppet fans.

I try and catch everything the Muppets do.

I miss this one.

Yeah, which tells you something, even for a Muppet super fan.

Yeah.

But here's the thing.

That child star clout does mean she can command some serious money.

For her role in Monte Carlo in 2011, Selena reportedly got $2.5 million playing an American tourist mistaken for a British heiress in France.

And then, boom, a riot of day-glow bikinis, bumping, grinding, guns, chaos.

It all explodes onto our screens.

And in the words of the movie, it's spring break, y'all.

And Selena Gomez is officially done with playing it safe.

So she split from her band, she goes solo, and what now?

So she's stepping outside her PG past with this bold, risky role in a 2012 indie flick called Spring Breakers.

It's raunchy.

It's violent.

It's directed by a kind of enfant terrible of film, Harmony Corrine.

Selena plays a girl called Faith.

So she's one of four college girls, including another ex-Disney star, Vanessa Hudgens.

They rob a fast food joint to fund a wild spring break vacation.

And, you know, there's booze, there's drugs, there's police arrests.

always in bikinis and the girls are bailed out by James Franco playing this gun-tilting grill-wearing drug dealer character.

I did, just for research purposes, look at the trail of this film and I found myself saying, I hope that no one is watching me watch this.

So it's sort of, it's research.

I promise you, it's research.

Yeah, I mean, Selena's character, I have to say, is probably the least morally vile character in the whole show.

She knows she's the moral compass.

She's the one who's, she checks out.

She gets spooked a bit by all the crazy stuff.

She checks out.

She goes home before things get really gnarly and they really do.

um the rest of them are not so lucky but i will say it is a good film it is entertaining what selena made clear at the time was that it's about taking a really calculated risk not blowing up that image for the shock factor you know in the same way miley cyrus had done in that wrecking ball music video where she's basically posing naked on top of a wrecking ball so she actually told the new york times that she wouldn't have taken on one of the edgier roles in that film because it's as far as i could go at this point in my career in life it's me taking baby steps i know people will judge my involvement in the film as a whole, and I'm prepared for that.

So that's interesting.

She didn't want to go the full.

And the critics were divided, right?

Yes.

Some called it provocative, brilliant.

Others thought it was pure trash.

But Spring Breakers was actually a commercial success, which is relatively rare for an indie film.

And it even earned a spot in competition for the Golden Line at the Venice Film Festival.

2013 was, in fact, a whirlwind year for Selena Gomez.

She was working to reintroduce herself to the world, all grown up, as we've discussed.

She had a a couple of films out.

She was hitting the promotional circuit hard.

She was on every show, Dancing with the Stars, Late Show with David Letterman, Good Morning America, Jimmy Fallon's Late Night Show.

And the goal is simple, get her in front of an audience who'd never even heard of Wizards of Waverly Place and probably didn't know who Barney was.

Yeah, exactly.

So while she was still pivoting professionally, though, there were still kind of problems in her personal life because it was making just as many headlines.

So she was still weathering a very public fallout from a breakup with Justin Bieber.

They'd actually called it quits the year before, reportedly due to crazy schedules and some quote-unquote trust issues.

But the press just wouldn't let it go.

Still, Selena had no shortage of other stuff going on in her life.

Just after turning 21, her debut solo album Stars Dance shot straight to number one.

Her single Come and Get It was her first to crack the top 10, so things were looking up.

And then in August, she kicked off her solo tour.

But after powering through 60 shows, she abruptly cancelled the remaining 13 dates across Australia and Asia.

And her reason, she said, was it's become clear to me and those close to me that after many years of putting my work first, I need to spend some time on myself to be the best person I can be.

And then came even more headlines.

Yeah, in January 2014, Selena quietly checked herself into a rehab facility in Arizona.

The media, of course, went wild.

Whispers of addiction, heartbreak, burnout, classic child star narrative was practically writing itself.

But everyone had it all wrong.

So a year later, in a 2015 interview with Billboard, Selena set the record straight.

She'd been battling lupus, which is a serious autoimmune disease.

She'd undergone chemotherapy.

She was sick.

She wasn't coming off drugs.

And in her words, I was diagnosed with lupus and I've been through chemo.

That's what my break was really about.

I could have had a stroke.

And the worst part, she says, was, I was angry.

I even felt the need to say that.

It's awful walking into a restaurant and having the room look at you, knowing what they're saying.

I locked myself away until I was comfortable and confident again.

Yeah, and it is a serious disease, lupus.

It's one of those ones which can have a huge variety of symptoms, and it is really debilitating.

It's incredible.

She was even touring with lupus.

Yeah, really, really amazing.

And I'm clearly getting an idea where she's battling quite a lot of things, both on her physical and her mental health.

And she says she wanted to hide away.

The trappings of fame, however, and and success do mean that her hideaway is not that bad.

She retreated to her $3.7 million estate in Calabasas, which is a sort of private, quiet, kind of nice area of Los Angeles, away from all that tabloid noise.

Yep, famously also the home to the Kardashians.

Yes, of course it is.

Yeah, they're probably neighbors.

Yes, exactly.

Well, neighbors in their gated communities.

Yeah.

But just after a month after she settles into that Calabasas estate, Selena drops a bombshell.

So she fires her mum and stepdad as her managers.

Mandy, do you remember Mandy?

Her mum said it was a total shock.

But honestly, this is kind of a classic coming of age moment in the entertainment world, right?

Selena says it was awkward and at the time it felt like she'd lost everything, but she wasn't about to stay down for long.

It's such an interesting moment, that, isn't it?

When you basically realize I've gone into a professional sphere where having mum and dad or mum in her case is not the most appropriate person, the most clued up, the most experienced to be your manager.

It happens with sports stars as well.

If you think about like McEnroe, there comes a point saying, I've taken you so far, and actually, I'm pretty ill-equipped to deal with the level of fame that you've now achieved.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, parental feelings come in, they can interfere, and things can get messy.

Yeah, in twenty sixteen, Selena hit was back on the road again, this time to promote her second Salo album, Revival, new album, new energy, and a new label, Interscope.

So couldn't get a bit more f further away from disney than interscope very famous for being hip-hop kind of music label yeah so this revival tour was meant to be this new chapter in her life like a full reboot of that music career after years of health battles but just like her first solo tour it really didn't go the distance so three months in while she was in new zealand selena pulled the plug on the whole thing she shared publicly that she was struggling with anxiety panic attacks and depression, things that she says were side effects of her lupus.

And she said, I know I'm not alone.

By sharing sharing this, I hope others will be encouraged to address their own issues.

The tour by then had brought in over $30 million in ticket sales.

And it did nothing to slow down her star power because in 2016, she became the most followed person on Instagram, 103 million followers at the time, edging out close friend and another one of our billionaires.

Taylor Swift.

Beating Taylor Swift on social media is no mean feat.

Yeah.

I mean, I think this is a really interesting kind of inflection point in pop star celebrity because, and I know now Taylor Swift seems completely untouchable in the same way that Beyoncé is completely untouchable, but you have moments in some pop stars' careers where they really weren't just on top and there were lots of people coming up behind them to snatch the crown.

Like Selena Gomez could have become one of those people.

It's actually strange that Selena isn't even bigger than she already is.

You know, as we talk, she's got a new album coming out with her fiancé, Benny Blanco.

Maybe that will be the thing that pushes her finally to the top tier.

But, you know, I do think her health conditions have been the kind of thing that have maybe held her back from becoming a total global superstar.

Interesting.

Held her back or enhanced her appeal to a generation who

basically welcomed the idea that

mental health issues, physical health issues, whatever, were difficult for everyone and actually struggling.

Because Taylor Swift comes across as kind of almost like an Amazonian queen, but she's very strong.

And whereas Selena Gomez, it's slightly different message, which I would say channels into quite a lot of people's experiences.

Yeah, it's an interesting debate.

I do feel like if you want to make a lot of money, and this is what I learned from our Taylor episode, if you want to make a lot of money in music and you want to do it through touring and your actual music, you have to be.

an absolute machine.

You can't stop touring.

You can't stop making new music.

You can't take a break in the way that Selena has.

But Selena's found, as we'll see later on in the episode, a different way to make those billions.

Yeah.

And of course, the brands, the brands, the brands, the brands

are paying attention.

Anyone who's got over 100 million followers on any social media platform in the attention economy, as it's called, you are hot property.

Exactly.

Selena locked in deals with brands like Coach, of Louis Vuitton.

Each one was reportedly worth $10 million.

And the following year, she had a partnership for $30 million with Puma Sports Brand.

So making a serious bank of brands.

Exactly.

And then in 2017, Selena shocked the world again with an Instagram post that went viral.

She revealed she'd undergone a kidney transplant due to complications from lupus and that her best friend, actress Francia Raisa, had been the one to donate hers.

The photo pictured Selena and Francia holding hands in their hospital beds, a pretty raw shot of Selena's post-surgery scar.

And that post alone racked up over 10 million likes.

Yeah, so quite the kind of disclosure, I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And in 2018, Selena announced that she was actually stepping away from social media altogether not long after she quietly entered another mental health treatment facility yeah and then in 2018 selena's mum mandy remember she's been fired as her kind of manager her mum gets a call but it's not from selena it's from the tabloid press and they are asking why is your daughter in the hospital with a nervous breakdown Well, Mandy was blindsided.

She later said, Selena didn't want anything to do with me, and I was scared she was going to die.

Meanwhile, Selena's mental health had taken a terrifying turn.

Things had escalated.

She was hearing voices.

She had experienced an episode of psychosis.

Now, Selena says she doesn't remember much from this time, but she does know that she spent several months in a treatment facility.

She was paranoid.

She couldn't trust anyone.

And at her lowest, she was saying she didn't want to be alive.

And there were real fears that she might never recover.

And it was around this time that doctors diagnosed her with bipolar disorder.

And for Selena, that diagnosis finally made everything else click.

The crushing lows, the manic highs, all of it suddenly made sense.

She later told Rolling Stone there were times she couldn't sleep for nights in a row, times she felt she needed to buy a car for everyone she knew.

And then there were the crashes, weeks, months sometimes when she couldn't get out of bed.

I didn't want anyone to talk to me, she said.

And while this diagnosis brought her some clarity, the treatment itself was anything but smooth.

So Selena was prescribed multiple medications, some of which left her feeling like a ghost, she said.

Eventually, there was a new psychiatrist who stepped in, cut back most of her meds, and slowly Selena says she began to feel human again.

And that's not the only thing she retraced because she also reconnected with her mom and stepdad, the very people she'd once pushed away.

Yeah, she also opened up about the actual toll it took on her.

She says, I had to learn how to remember certain words.

I'd forget where I was in the middle of conversations.

It took a lot of hard work, first to accept that I was bipolar, and second, to learn to actually live with it because it's not going away.

And she goes public with her bipolar diagnosis in April 2020 on an episode, funnily enough, of Miley Cyrus' lockdown Instagram live series, Bright Minded.

So, you know, brave move.

The language around all of this has changed.

Back in Judy Garland's era, 100 years ago nearly, you know, she was going through stuff having mental breakdowns and depression.

The studios would never have dreamt of allowing people to know that at the time.

Yeah, she would never have been allowed to talk about it.

But I think what's so interesting about Selena opening up about this is that, you know, having bipolar disorder is still a highly stigmatized condition.

Not a lot of people know very much about it.

You know, it's still kind of seen as this disorder that makes you really erratic, untrustworthy.

It's seen as a kind of debilitating, severe illness.

Whereas I feel like...

The mental health conversations now, we've managed to destigmatize a lot of stuff around anxiety and depression, but bipolar disorder is one of those conditions, I think, that is still kind of falling behind so that's interesting so that you would put that in a separate category exactly so i i do think genuinely this was a brave thing for her to do yeah and and around this time we sort of see a shift in her herself um a kind of political awakening maybe yeah definitely like she opened up about her family history you know she told people that her paternal grandparents were undocumented when they came to the U.S.

That is actually a really big deal, given how politically loaded that issue is.

And she also executive produced a Netflix documentary series called Living Undocumented, which spotlights the stories of immigrant families facing deportation.

Also, during the Black Lives Matter movement, she handed over her Instagram account, which was, you know, one of the most followed in the world, to black activists so they could share their voices and reach millions directly.

So, you know, a real...

pivot, I would say.

It's quite a thing to give away.

We talk about the attention economy being worth millions, probably even billions.

Hundreds of billions, I would say.

Yeah, so that is a very powerful thing to do.

We've talked a lot about her personal journey let's talk about the money yes let's that's why we're here in in many ways because that same year 2020 Selena decided to launch a beauty brand with a mission baked right into its den eight which was about supporting mental health and it's called rare beauty I was talking to my daughter about this and saying Selena goes and whereas my wife fell off a chair thinking because she's a billionaire my daughter had no problem believing that and said it must be rare beauty it's so popular and so it is but she's combined that with some of the previous issues we've talked about because 1% of all Rare Beauty sales go directly to Selena's Rare Impact Fund charity with the goal of raising $100 million over the next 10 years for mental health organizations.

And even the names of the products nod to these kind of, you know, popular affirmations.

Stay vulnerable, liquid eyeshadow, always an optimist eye primer, with gratitude lip balm.

I mean, I'm kind of a cynic, so I don't think I would be reaching for the with gratitude lip balm anytime soon.

It's a long way from the power suits and the makeup of the 1980s, where it was all about projecting power.

Right.

The brand itself, actually, you know, to counter all the cynicism, says it's about breaking down unrealistic standards of perfection.

But obviously, if, you know...

If you're a cynic, you'll agree with Time magazine's assessment, which is that there's a tension here.

Gomez and her team are managing to sell millions of dollars worth of product while also promoting the idea that no one needs makeup.

Yeah, buy this makeup you don't need.

She was quick to respond though, saying, I hope I don't and I hope Rare Beauty doesn't give off the vibe that you have to do anything.

And when it comes to that double standard, people being judged for showing imperfections and wearing too much makeup, she said in more BBC friendly terms, well, she said, it's rubbish, let's put it that way.

So Rare Beauty joins a very crowded market for celebrity beauty brands, including a few that have made some of our previous billionaires on the show very wealthy.

So Kim Kardashian's skin and Rihanna's fenty beauty but this is not a problem rare beauty seems to be more than holding its own against those brands in 2022 it sells 70 million dollars worth of its best-selling blusher and it raised five million for the rare impact fund and selena also co-founded a mental health platform called wondermind alongside her mum mandy and daniela pearson what is this kind of thing well it calls itself a mental fitness ecosystem so break it down it's mental health tools it's podcasts interviews newsletters.

It's all aimed at helping people build healthy habits around their mental well-being.

This isn't just a passion project, though.

It's a business.

It is because in 2022, Wondermind was valued at a cool $100 million

and had backing from big names like Lightspeed Venture Partner Sequoia Capital.

Now, in my world, Sequoia Capital, if you've got the backing of Sequoia Capital, these are people who've backed some of the biggest internet businesses in history.

Even tennis legend Serena Williams has her own capital fun called Serena Ventures.

So she's in as well.

Well, apparently the mental health startup market is worth $5.5 billion in 2021, which seems like so much money.

There is a massive commercial opportunity in doing for mental health what medical technology has done for physical health.

So it's an enormous pit of potential money.

Yeah, what's the GlaxoSmithKline of mental health, basically?

Well, I mean, GlaxoSmithKline would probably tell you that they are all over that too.

But importantly, you know, she's not just doing Wondermind, she hasn't actually left acting behind.

Selena began starring in the Hulu TV show Only Murders in the Building in 2021.

She stars as a podcaster, so a girl after our own hearts.

Yep, and it also paid off both literally and figuratively.

She earned her first ever Emmy nomination for acting in 2024, later a Golden Globe nod too.

Yeah, she stars in all four seasons of the show.

It's estimated she's earning at least $6 million per season.

And that's not including her extra pay as an executive producer.

And you know from ever watching the credits for any successful thing, there are lots of executive producers.

Exactly.

Very important people in the business.

In 2022...

We love our own, by the way.

We love our own exec producers and producers.

In 2022, Selena revealed her most vulnerable work yet.

She actually took audiences behind the scenes of this mental health journey with a very raw and unfiltered documentary called Selena Gomez, My Mind and Me.

Now, important to know, this footage wasn't originally even meant to tell this story.

So it's directed by a guy called Alec Kashishian.

He's the same guy who made an iconic documentary called Madonna Truth or Dare back in the 90s.

He had set out to film this kind of behind-the-scenes, light-hearted look at the revival tour, you know, this post-Disney reinvention.

And Alec realized while filming that something was just really off.

So he later said, she was not in a great place.

She was so young, remember, at the time she was in her very early 20s so he stopped filming and then years later they both decided to come back to that footage and weave it into my mind and me now selena actually later admitted she actually almost pulled the plug completely she told rolling stone because i have the platform i have it's kind of like i'm sacrificing myself a bit for a greater purpose god's honest truth a few weeks ago i wasn't sure i could do it yeah i mean these days selena deals with some of the intense spotlight by pulling back when she says she needs to.

That includes from social media.

She's spoken openly about how toxic the comments can get.

In a 2021 interview, she revealed she'd actually handed over the reins of her social media accounts to her assistant.

That's not unusual, I don't think, in that world.

She still provides the photos and the captions, but she rarely posts directly.

Still, that hasn't slowed down her popularity.

In 2023, Selena became the first woman to reach 400 million followers on Instagram.

Yeah, I'm a cynic about this stuff, I have to say, which is that if Selena Gomez was to come out and say, I'm absolutely fine, no one needs to worry about me ever again, all is well, would interest,

would her capital in the attention economy diminish somewhat?

I mean, I kind of feel some sympathy for the people who have grown up famous.

I know you shouldn't because, you know, they've had everything handed to them on a silver plate and they've been earning money since they were in kind of baby prams.

But if you've only ever grown up in the public eye and you are on social media both as a person and as a personality, I actually think the lines are really blurred.

So while you and I might kind of go through a month and think, oh, I hate Instagram.

I just want to leave.

I'm just going to leave.

Nobody's going to notice or care.

But if Selena wants to do it, she's got, it becomes a huge deal.

Yeah.

I'm really torn because part of me says, okay, you've got plenty of money.

You've got a, you've got a billion dollars.

If it can be that risky to be in the public eye that much, where sometimes you like it and sometimes you don't, just don't do it.

Take your money and go.

I feel like every single person on the face of the earth, celebrities, are just as addicted to being online as we are.

All right.

But meanwhile, the real guts of her wealth, the reason she's even on our list, is her beauty empire, which is booming.

By 2024, Rare Beauty is valued at a staggering $2 billion.

Even whispers reported by Bloomberg, very credible financial news outfit, that Selena had hired advisors to explore a possible sale.

But just a few months later, she told Time magazine she had no plans to sell.

I just wonder what a beauty brand founded by Selena Gomez without her involved is really worth the same amount of money.

Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?

I'm sure if she did sell the company, she would stay on as the kind of

director, exactly.

Creative consultant.

They would invent a role for her to stay on as a face of it.

But because it's a private company, you know, it's not listed on stock exchange, the full financial picture of Rare Beauty isn't actually public.

Analysts estimate that it brings in about $350 and $400 million in annual sales, but with only a couple of known investors, including Nikki Islami's New Theory Ventures and CEO Scott Friedman, who previously sold NYX Cosmetics, another huge beauty brand to L'Oreal, the Bloomberg analysts assume that Selena holds a majority stake of 51%, which is important.

Yeah, and as we've said, that is how, in September 2024, Selena Gomez enters a whole new league.

She's officially listed on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index for the very first time with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion.

And just breaking that down, 81% of that, $1.1 billion, is derived from her stake in Rare Beauty.

19% comes from endorsements with all sorts of people touring mental health platform, record sales, acting, 1.3%.

There you go.

And record sales, 1.8.

So acting and record sales combined 3% of her work.

Well, actually, I think what's really interesting is how much streaming contributes to her wealth.

So streaming accounts for 0.7%

of her fortune.

Think about it.

This is a girl who is on Disney Records, who's had multiple albums, who's featured on loads of other artists' tracks, she's probably got millions, if not billions, of streams, and that is less than 1% of her wealth.

Anyone below the top 5%

gets very little compared to the old days of album sales.

So, Selena Gomez, Disney darling to beauty mogo, to mental health advocate, or just at 32 years old.

I mean, God, she's young.

Wow, 32, and she's done all that.

I think we will be hearing a lot more from Selena in the years to come.

She's got a long way to go.

She's got several more billions to make.

You think so?

Okay, we'll see.

see.

Okay, I reckon her profile will decline over the next 10 years.

I can see a future in which someone like Lvi MH buys Rare Beauty.

Okay.

The same people who own 50% of Fenty.

Exactly.

And they pay her to just stay on as the creative director.

I'm going to put a bet on it now.

Okay, done.

Well, at 32, she's been through a lot, but we have to judge her now.

And this is where we judge our billionaires by a variety of categories from naught to 10 on things like wealth, villainy, philanthropy, power, etc., etc.

And we always start with wealth.

So you go first.

So, you know, she is worth about $1.3 billion.

Selena used to live in the $5 million former home of the American rock musician Tom Petty with her grandparents, though it's reported that she and her fiancé Benny Blanco bought a kind of big Beverly Hills mansion for 35 million in December of 2024.

And presumably that's where she is.

Yeah.

So she's spending money, but she's not really in the big leagues of building.

And also she doesn't seem that kind of blingy.

It's not like fly out my nails assistant, you know, on a private jet.

I don't know.

It doesn't seem that way to me.

Interestingly, like a lot of her album promo, you know, the album artwork, the music videos, she's just in an oversized t-shirt.

Yeah.

I mean, kind of like, you know, casual, down-to-earth.

That's kind of her vibe.

But I will say, I think she scores a little bit higher for me in this category because of the journey that her and her family have been on.

Essentially, raised by a single teenage mum,

grew up

not very well off at all, kind of took a big punt to becoming a Disney's channel star.

Worked hard for that.

So I think for me, her journey to where she is now to a billionaire pushes her up the league of wealthy people.

Usually I'd give her, in terms of pure wealth, I'd give her a one.

But I'm going to give her a four.

Yeah, I'm going to be slightly more generous and give her a five out of ten.

Okay.

Four for me, five for you.

What about villainy?

This is when we look at, you know, what people have done to get to the top.

And we've had some real wrongins in there.

She doesn't paint a particularly villainous picture to me.

What do you think?

No, there have been some big kind of controversies, I guess, in recent years.

So, you know, there was this Woody Allen comedy called A Rainy Day in New York.

She acted in that, even though he's faced allegations that he sexually abused his then seven-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, in 1992.

Alan, for the record, has always denied these allegations.

But Selena and her co-stars from that film ended up donating their salaries to charities, including Time's Up, after Dylan Farrow, now grown up, kind of

renewed the allegations around the time of the film's release.

Yeah.

Okay, so what are you going to give her for villainy?

Well, you know.

She's a bad woman.

No, she's made some bad acting choices.

That's not really villainy, is it?

That's not villainy.

That's just bad advice from your agent.

Or just, you know, just taking a punt on something that doesn't work out.

I'm going to give a zero on villainy yeah i'm going to give her unless unless you believe that

she mobilizes mental health as a promotional tool but you know she's had some well-documented brushes with really serious conditions like lupus for example bipolar disorder and she has contributed to seminars so she's put a little bit back in so she's been a useful input into that process but i'm going to give a zero for villainy yeah I'll give her a zero.

All right, so we both gave zero on villainy, which means giving back what she's done philanthropically.

Yeah, so she's obviously pledged 1% of all rare beauty sales to the Rare Impact Fund.

In 2022, in their social impact report, the company said it's already raised $5 million out of its $100 million aim, $2 million of which had already been donated to 16 organizations around the world.

And for each episode of her cooking show, Celine and Chef, Share makes a $10,000 donation to to a charitable cause in the first three seasons, $400,000 to 26 non-profit organisations.

Yeah, that's pretty interesting as well.

Rare Beauty also made donations of an undisclosed amount to the Bail Project, which is a criminal justice project in America, and the NAACP's legal defense fund during the Black Lives Matter protests.

Yeah.

You add all that up.

And I know she wants to aim 100, raise $100 million.

I see $5 million so far and

probably another million elsewhere, less than half of 1% of our wealth.

So, I mean, it all sounds well-meaning.

It doesn't add up to a whole lot just yet.

I'm going to give her a four on this one.

Yeah, I mean, I think I'd agree.

It's not a very efficient way of distributing those funds, is it?

Yeah, and also 1%

of sales to the impact fund.

I don't know.

That sounds more like the dividing line between people will buy that because they're thinking it's a philanthropic exercise, but but it's not high enough to be that generous.

So I'm going to give a very guarded three on philanthropy.

Right.

I will give her,

I kind of feel, hmm, I'm going to tone on this one.

Isn't she more useful philanthropically in kind of who she is rather than what she does?

What she gives?

That's a good point.

Yeah.

In terms of what kind of awareness she raises for various causes, I think I'd be more generous.

I'd give her a four out of 10.

Okay, three and a four.

And in a way, what we've just discussed bleeds into the category of power.

She's got 421 million followers on Instagram.

I mean, that's a meaningful chunk of the entire world's population.

Yeah, and if you could get 0.01% of them to support a cause and buy a product, that's a lot of power.

She was very important in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Very interesting to see where the Selena Gomez character goes in Donald Trump's America.

Undocumented Mexican immigrant grandparents, handing over your platform to Black Lives Matter during the George Floyd moment, all of those things, you know, sensitive issues in Trump's America right now.

It's going to be quite interesting.

I actually think this is something she is probably grappling with at this very moment because I know that when Donald Trump got elected or inaugurated, she posted quite tearfully on her social media accounts, basically saying, you know, my grandparents were undocumented.

What is going on with this country?

And she kind of came under fire from some right-wing media commentators for that.

She deleted the post, probably because, you know, a whole lot of hate was directed towards her after she got kind of told off in that way.

But I wouldn't put it past her to in the next year or so to come out with something a lot more considered and thought out.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's interesting because she also she kind of fell short of officially endorsing Biden in 2020.

In 2024, she kind of posted a picture and a video of herself posting her election ballot on Instagram Instagram and TikTok.

She kind of didn't say who she was voting for, but there was a blue heart emoji, which many took to imply supporting Kamala Harris.

Okay.

So, you know, she's not really pushed herself out there.

Okay.

On power, I'm going to give her quite a high score.

I mean, anyone with nearly half a billion followers on Instagram is pretty powerful.

So I'm going to give her, in the modern world, a solid seven on that one.

Well, actually, funnily enough, I would agree with your seven.

Yeah.

Because I don't think she could pick up the phone to the White House, no way.

Yeah, okay, so seven, seven, we've got to decide whether she's good, bad, and lush as a billionaire.

This one's an easy one for me.

Um, she's not a bad person, is she?

So, I'm gonna say she's a good billionaire, yeah.

I would say, I would say, if she hadn't done all that stuff around mental health awareness, spoken about being bipolar, you know, she would be just another billionaire, she would just be another billionaire for sure.

But for me, that is the stuff that edges her into being a good billionaire.

Okay, congratulations, Salima.

You'll be very grateful to know that you have been passed as a good billionaire, but a good, bad billionaire team.

So, who is next week?

So, it's former Marvel CEO and chairman, Ike Polmutter, the notoriously media-shy billionaire who brought the comics company back from the brink of ruin and helped launch the Marvel cinematic universe.

And for someone in Showbiz, he is surprisingly camera-shy.

Ike even went to Iron Man's 2008 premiere disguised in glasses and a fake moustache.

But where he really stands out is making a profit from other people's mistakes.

That's on the next episode of Good Bad Billionaire.

Thanks for joining us.

You've been listening to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

This episode was produced by Louise Morris.

Our researcher was Annie Rose Harrison Dutton.

And our editor Paul Smith.

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