Celebrate & Support Women's Success

FemWealth Issue #22

Aug 08, 2021

Happy Sunday, FemWealth Friends!

What an exciting week! Rihanna became a newly minted Forbes list billionaire, and Reese Witherspoon sold her company Hello Sunshine for $900 million. Forbes has also just published its 2021 edition of America's Richest Self-Made Women. The 15 newcomers include former Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi and several founders who took their companies public earlier this year.

It's terrific to see more and more high-achieving women for whom success goes well beyond accumulating money, power, and influence. They elevate other women, launch products that cater to women's needs, tell stories that have been previously ignored and give voice to the voiceless. They create environments where women of all backgrounds can succeed.

In today’s edition of FemWealth, meet the women who redefine success:

Rihanna, Singer, and Founder of Fenty Beauty & Savage x Fenty

I wanted to include every woman. I wanted every woman on the stage with different energies, different races, body types, different stages in their womanhood, culture.
I wanted women to feel celebrated and that we started this s**t. We own this. This is our land because really it is.

The Barbados-born multitalented singer, actor, designer, and entrepreneur, Robyn Rihanna Fenty, redefines the rules of success in the music and beauty industries. She started her international singer career at fifteen, released eight albums, and won nine Grammy Awards, 14 Billboard Music Awards (among many other music accolades), becoming one of the best-selling musical artists of all time.

With a net worth of $1.7B, Rihanna is the wealthiest female musician and the second wealthiest female entertainer, only behind Oprah. However, as Forbes points out, not her music has made her so rich, but her entrepreneurial ventures Fenty Beauty (a collaboration with the luxury conglomerate LVMH) of which she owns 50%, and Savage x Fenty, her lingerie brand valued at $270 million.

With Fenty Beauty, Rihanna catered to underserved groups of racially diverse consumers, offering 40 foundation shades that match a broader range of skin tones. It created "the Fenty effect," which led other brands to suddenly up their diversity game and set a new industry standard.

Rihanna has also challenged the fashion industry with Fenty (discontinued in February 2021) and Savage x Fenty by including women of all shapes, sizes, races, and even pregnant women in the fashion shows.

Rihanna is also an Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Barbados (since 2018) and a philanthropist. In 2012 she founded the Clara Lionel Foundation - in honor of her grandparents, Clara and Lionel Braithwaite - to support and fund education, health, and emergency response programs worldwide.

And she is just getting started.

📖 Fenty’s Fortune: Rihanna Is Now Officially A Billionaire

📖 Beauty and Lingerie Lines Help Rihanna Become a Billionaire

Serena Williams, Athlete, Businesswoman, Investor and Philanthropist

The success of every woman should be the inspiration to another. We should raise each other up. Make sure you’re very courageous: be strong, be extremely kind, and above all be humble.
I want to be a part of it. I want to be in the infrastructure. I want to be the brand, instead of just being the face.

She’s known as one of the greatest tennis players of all time, having won 23 Grand Slam singles titles (the last one while pregnant with her daughter Olympia), but Serena Williams’ success transcends sports. With a net worth of $240 million, she is the first athlete ever to hit Forbes’ annual list of the Richest Self-Made Women. She earned $94 million in career prize money (2x as much as any other female athlete has made) and has lucrative partnerships with global brands.

In 2014, Williams became an impact investor, launching Serena Ventures (kept secret until 2019) to invest in companies founded by underestimated entrepreneurs, mainly women and people of color. She has since invested in over 50 startups. She also ventured into the fashion world, establishing a direct-to-consumer clothing line, S by Serena, in 2018 and an eponymous jewelry line in 2019.

She is also a philanthropist committed to causes such as food security and social justice in the US, and, in addition, she supports several organizations worldwide. And as she puts it, she dreams big and lives her life even bigger, and she’s not even close to done.

🎥 Lessons in Life and Business from Serena Williams

Chloé Zhao, writer, director, producer

I often feel like an outsider wherever I go, so I'm always attracted to stories about identity and the meaning of home.
What’s interesting to me is the quest for something grander. The mystery of the unknown, whether that’s God or spirits or aliens or whatever. I’m interested in what lies beyond the horizon.

Nomadland's director, Chloé Zhao, made history this year becoming the first woman from an ethnic minority background and only the second woman to win the best director award at the Oscars (after Kathryn Bigelow for "The Hurt Locker" in 2009) in the 93 years history of the Academy Awards. Nominated for Best Director, Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Editing, the Chinese-born, British-educated, and US-based Zhao also won Best Picture.

Based on Jessica Bruder's nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, the movie combines documentary and fictional storytelling to portray the nomadic journey of Fern - played by Frances McDormand - a widow in her 60s and former substitute teacher in Empire, Nevada. Like many of her fellow itinerants in the van-dwelling community, she had lost everything in the 2008 financial crisis and searches for work.

Shot with a small budget and mainly featuring amateur actors (just like Zhao's first two movies, "The Rider" and "Songs My Brother Taught Me"), Nomadland portrays people in the margins of society in the American West. Premiered to critical acclaim, it became one of the most-awarded movies in modern history.

Zhao's next movie, Eternals, produced by Marvel, will hit theaters in November. Its all-star cast includes Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek.

🎥 Chloé Zhao on Making Oscars History and How She Stayed True to Herself Directing Marvel’s ‘Eternals’

Recognizing women’s contributions in science 📡

An Op-Documentary about Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell (featured in FemWealth Issue #13)

The Change-Makers in Venture Capital 💸

Featuring Jess Lee (Sequoia), Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures), Emily Melton (DFJ) and other leading investors who challenge the status quo in the US Venture Capital Industry

FemWealth Curated News

From Rihanna To Dolly Parton: Inside Forbes’ Seventh Annual List Of America’s Richest Self-Made Women - the combined worth of the 100 “self-made moguls” is $118 billion—31% more than last year. The list of new billionaires includes 23andMe’s Anne Wojcicki, Bumble’s founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, Figs’ co-founders Heather Hasson and Trina Spear, and Guild Education’s Rachel Carlson.

Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine Sold for $900 Million to Media Company Backed by Blackstone - Worth $400 million, Witherspoon is the world’s richest actress

The number of women running Global 500 businesses soars to an all-time high - women are now running 23 of the companies on the Global 500 equalling 4.6% of the total CEOs

Women Spac founders are good for finance - FT’s Gillian Tett on the importance of diversity in Special purpose acquisition companies

Why Elite Female Athletes Are Turning Away From Major Sponsors

I Tried to Live Off Women-Owned Businesses. Turns Out, Men Still Run Everything

Discover The Extraordinary Women Who Make Up This Year’s Vogue 25

The Facebook Whistleblower Speaks Out - Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook, revealed the platform’s failure to combat political manipulation campaigns across 25 countries