The Youngest Of America's Richest Self-Made Women

According to the Forbes, Taylor Swift Is The Youngest Of America's Richest Self-Made Women

 

Going For The Gold: Swift has plenty of hardware–and a net worth to match–despite her young age. (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images).

At age 26, Taylor Swift has already won plenty of accolades: 10 Grammys, five Guinness World records and even an Emmy.
A handful of honors have come from FORBES, including Swift’s selection to our inaugural 30 Under 30 list, six consecutive appearances in our Celebrity 100 issue–and, now, the distinction of being the youngest name on our list of America’s wealthiest self-made women.
Swift clocks in at $250 million, claiming the No. 60 spot on a list that includes moguls such as Oprah Winfrey ($3.1 billion), Tory Burch ($750 million) and Diane von Furstenberg ($340 million) and fellow musicians like Madonna ($560 million), Barbra Streisand ($370 million) and Beyonce Knowles ($265 million).
In order to keep such company, Swift has transformed herself into–quite possibly–the world’s biggest pop superstar. She started out as a teenaged country singer, signing to Scott Borchetta’s fledgling Big Machine Records, eventually negotiating to own a piece of the label that’s now home to Country Cash Kings like Rascal Flatts and Tim McGraw.

As she churned out one platinum album after another–earning at least $40 million pretax in each of the past six years–she enriched not only herself and Borchetta, but fellow country centimillionaire Toby Keith. By how much, exactly? “There’s an extra comma if you added up all the money I’ve ever made,” Keith once told FORBES.

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Swift officially left country when she launched the unapologetically poppy 1989, which moved 3.7 million units to become the top-selling album of 2014, and propelled her to a new career high payday of $80 million in 2015. This year she’s poised to set a new mark, thanks to her recent 1989 Tour, which grossed a quarter of a billion dollars last year, far more than any other tour.
At the same time, Swift has become an outspoken advocate for musicians’ rights to fair royalty rates as the industry adjusts to the streaming model, pulling her music from Spotify and penning a firm letter to Apple last year when the company initially refused to pay artists for spins generated by customers who’d signed up for a free trial of its new music service.
“We don’t ask you for free iPhones,” she wrote. “Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.”
The company quickly changed its tune, and many observers credited Swift. That’s just the sort of power that doesn’t necessarily add another zero to one’s net worth–but certainly connotes the sort of influence that, regardless of age, should make Swift right at home in this lofty group for years to come.