Rihanna Becomes First Black Woman to Build Two Billion-Dollar Companies
Rihanna Becomes First Black Woman to Build Two Billion-Dollar Companies
Music - November 22, 2025
Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty together command a valuation topping billions — rewriting who gets to build power in beauty and fashion.
Rihanna didn’t just dominate pop culture. She cracked open the black box of how modern consumer empires get built — and then built two of them before turning 40. The music is the myth, but the businesses are the machine. While the world was waiting for a new album, she was becoming the first Black woman in history to build two separate billion-dollar companies from scratch: Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty. Not licensing, not endorsements, not cash-for-face-time deals — actual founder stakes, ownership, and equity.
The story starts with Fenty Beauty’s launch in 2017, a drop that detonated across the beauty industry like a cultural EMP. Forty foundation shades at launch shouldn’t have been revolutionary, but the fact that it was reveals exactly why she won: she built a company around the customers legacy beauty forgot existed. She wasn’t selling blush; she was selling representation. Sephora shelves turned into battlegrounds. TikTok tutorials became free distribution. “Fenty face” became a cultural currency.
In its first year, Fenty Beauty reportedly did around half a billion in sales. By year two, the brand was the most Googled beauty line in the world. Eventually, its valuation climbed past the billion mark — and stayed there. When LVMH partnered with her, it wasn’t a celebrity licensing deal. It was a 50/50 joint venture with Rihanna as equal architect. The conglomerate that built Dior and Louis Vuitton now had to share the dashboard with a girl from Barbados who used to sell coconut candies on the street. That’s not a glow-up. That’s a structural realignment.
Then came Savage X Fenty — the lingerie brand that felt like the antidote to everything Victoria’s Secret used to stand for. Where the old guard sold fantasy, Savage sold reality: body diversity, gender inclusivity, softness, sexuality, and joy. The Savage shows on Amazon Prime weren’t fashion events; they were cultural corrections. Rihanna’s long-term thesis was embedded in the product itself: everyone deserves to feel hot, not just the people the industry traditionally approves.
Investors raced in. Jay-Z’s Marcy Venture Partners, Avenir, L Catterton — real money, real diligence, real checks. By 2021, Savage X Fenty hit a billion-dollar valuation. Two years later, headlines floated the possibility of a $3B IPO. Rihanna stepped down as CEO in 2023, bringing in a seasoned retail operator to scale the company while she remained as executive chair — the visionary role founders keep when the company outgrows gravity.
Between the two brands, Rihanna now oversees a combined empire estimated at $3.8 billion. That figure isn’t a flex. It’s an indictment of how low the bar used to be for “celebrity brands,” and how high she raised it. Rihanna didn’t build businesses that happen to have her name on them. She built businesses that now force competitors to reconsider who deserves shelf space, marketing dollars, and venture funding.
The irony is that music — the thing she became famous for — is the smallest part of her empire now. The Super Bowl halftime show wasn’t a comeback. It was a commercial. During the performance, she paused to powder her face with a red Fenty compact and the stock of the entire enterprise spiked online. Few founders can sell product mid-air on a suspended platform in front of 120 million people. Rihanna is one of them.
Those two billion-dollar companies aren’t accidents. They’re the result of a simple but devastating formula: she used attention as venture capital, identity as innovation, and inclusivity as the ultimate market expansion strategy. Her success is not a celebrity story. It’s an entrepreneurial one.
And now the question hanging over the entire industry is whether she’ll double down — buy more of Fenty Beauty if LVMH chooses to sell its stake — or build a third billion-dollar company for sport. If history’s any guide, she won’t announce it. She’ll just drop it.
And the market will move.
