From running out of gas money to a self-made billionaire at 32: Inside Selena Gomez’s success

“I can remember about seven times when our car got stuck on the highway because we’d run out of gas money,” Gomez told Elle in 2012, recounting her time growing up in poverty with her then-teen mom Mandy Teefey. 

“My mom gave up everything for me and had, like, three jobs,” Gomez said in a 2017 interview with E! Entertainment. 

Teefey, 16 at the time, gave birth to Gomez in 1992 in a “really rough neighborhood” of Grand Prairie, Texas. Five years later, she divorced her then-husband and raised Selena as a single mother while struggling to make it as a stage actress.

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As fate would have it, Gomez discovered her passion for acting after spending time on her mother’s theater sets, which later propelled her to stardom.

Teefey detailed her daughter’s early fascination with acting to the New York Times in 2017: “She went to one of my rehearsals with me and sat through the whole thing, not moving. On the way home, she was quiet, and then she goes, ‘You know, Mom, that might be funnier if you did it this way.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, no. She’s going to be an actor.”

And she did just that. 

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At just 10 years old, Selena made her acting debut on Barney and Friends, rising to fame five years later with her lead role in Disney’s Emmy award-winning series Wizards of Waverly Place, which earned her around $3 million in total, according to Cosmopolitan. She then transitioned to music as the leading lady of pop band Selena Gomez & the Scene before launching a successful solo career with her hit album Stars Dance, which ranked No. 1. 

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Today, Gomez boasts an impressive résumé: three studio albums, nine top-10 pop hits, 44 singles (half of which are platinum or gold), and two Grammy nominations.

Interestingly enough, acting and singing don’t make up the majority of Gomez’s fortune.

According to Bloomberg, music tours only accounted for less than 5% of Gomez’s wealth, with album and record sales less than 2%—unlike her close friend Taylor Swift, who reached billionaire status in October 2023 primarily from her music and concerts.

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“Selena is not just a pop star,” Stacy Jones, founder and CEO of Hollywood Branded, a Los Angeles-based branding agency, told Bloomberg.

Roughly 84% of Gomez’s wealth—$1.1 billion—comes from a stake in her makeup brand Rare Beauty, which she founded just five years ago. 

Launched in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, entering an already saturated market with celebrity-backed giants like Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty and Kim Kardashian’s SKKN, Gomez marketed Rare Beauty products as “moderately priced makeup,” according to Bloomberg.

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“I really tried my hardest to create products that were beyond just me putting my name on something,” she told 102.7 KIISFM in a 2023 radio interview. 

Of course, having the third most-followed Instagram account on the planet helped.

With 424 million followers on the platform, just behind soccer stars Christiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, Gomez aided her brand’s marketing efforts by posting clips of her applying makeup with Rare Beauty products. With 14 product categories and 150 items at launch, the brand quickly built a loyal following—especially for its viral liquid blush. In 2023, Rare Beauty hit $350 million in total sales, $70 million of which were generated from its blush alone, reports Bloomberg.

Her social media influence has also helped her secure multimillion-dollar deals with major brands like Puma and Coach, which earned her $30 million and $10 million, respectively.

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But that’s not all. The Come and Get It singer, who’s been open about her struggles with bipolar disorder and depression, started her own mental-health startup called Wondermind with her mother, which was valued at $100 million in 2022. 

“She’s a multifaceted businesswoman with diverse income streams contributing to her impressive net worth,” Stacy Jones tells Bloomberg. 

But despite all her business success, the Only Murders in the Building star (Hulu pays her $6 million per season) is most proud of her philanthropic mission to expand mental health services and education globally. She contributes 1% of her cosmetic sales to the Rare Impact Fund, which aims to raise $100 million by 2030. 

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At the TIME 100 Summit in April, Gomez said, “I think that we’ve been able to do something that, at least in cosmetics, no one has ever done. That is what makes me happy every night when I go to sleep.”