How Emily Ratajkowski Went From Swimwear Drops to Climate-Tech Deals
How Emily Ratajkowski Went From Swimwear Drops to Climate-Tech Deals
Style - November 22, 2025
The model-turned-mogul is proving that attention is a currency—and she intends to invest every last bit of it.
I’m doom-scrolling past a thousand sponsored thirst traps when Emily Ratajkowski pops up again. Except this time it’s not just another bikini shot—it’s a cap table. On paper she’s still “the girl from Blurred Lines,” the internet’s favorite Rorschach for feminism. In reality, she’s closer to a one-woman holding company: founder, author, podcaster, investor, and soon a screenwriter-producer.
The empire starts with Inamorata. She launched the brand in 2017, trademarked it through her own EmRata Holdings, and self-funded the entire operation. Vogue noted she kept the team tiny so she could keep control, a rarity in an industry that normally rents women like her as billboards. But she didn’t rent anything. She built a direct-to-consumer swim line and funneled it straight into her millions of followers. Forbes reported drops could sell out within 24 hours, which turns her Instagram feed into something closer to recurring revenue than influencer marketing. Over time, Inamorata expanded into intimates and body-con basics, leaning into her existing internet mythology with better margins.
Then she did something the industry didn’t expect: she wrote a book about the machinery behind her image. My Bodyarrived in 2021, dissecting the economics of being looked at. Speaking to Interview Magazine, she said, “Instagram was one of the places where I first experienced feeling some kind of control … I was the one who was able to choose the images.” But she added that writing the book forced her to let go of control, not cling to it. It was a pivot—Ratajkowski shifting from product to producer, examining how the gaze works while also monetizing the power it handed her.
That shift continued in audio. In 2022 she signed with Sony Music Entertainment to launch High Low with EmRata, a twice-weekly show that merges politics and philosophy with dating gossip and TikTok detritus. It’s a collision of high-low culture that mirrors her whole brand. The podcast gives her a direct conversation with fans and positions her not just as a face but as a host, someone who can carry an audience without relying on an algorithm’s mood swings.
Hollywood noticed the creative control. This year she teamed with Lena Dunham and author Stephanie Danler for a new A24 series on Apple TV+. She’ll star, but more importantly she’s making her screenwriting debut and serving as an executive producer—another move up the ladder from talent to ownership.
The portfolio gets more interesting when you leave fashion entirely. Ratajkowski is an angel investor in Prolific Machines, a cultivated-meat startup backed by major tech and finance names. This is not the kind of cap table you expect from a supermodel; it’s the deep-tech, “let’s reinvent protein” universe. She also invested in Neutral Foods, the carbon-neutral dairy company supported by John Legend, Questlove, and Maverick Carter. Suddenly the woman whose body built half the modern swimwear aesthetic is writing checks into climate-tech food systems designed to save the planet her industry helped overheat.
Taken together, the moves don’t feel random. Inamorata is ownership of her aesthetic. My Body is ownership of her narrative. The podcast is ownership of distribution. And the climate-tech investments are ownership of the future, a strategic bet that attention can fund something more meaningful than a swimsuit campaign. On Instagram it still looks like a pretty girl in great lighting. On a spreadsheet it looks like a creator who understands that attention is a currency—and that the smartest thing you can do with a currency is invest it.
For every model, influencer, and creator, the lesson lands hard: if the world is going to extract value from your image, you might as well turn the camera back on it. Own the line. Own the IP. Own the mic. And if you’re smart, own a few shares of the world that’s coming next.
