Selena Gomez is officially a billionaire. According to Bloomberg‘s Billionaires IndexThe 32-year-old actress, singer, investor and entrepreneur is now one of the country’s youngest self-made billionaires, with an astonishing $1.3 billion to her name. But her journey to this point was not easy.
“I can remember about seven times when our car got stuck on the highway because we ran out of gas money,” Gomez said. Elle in 2012, narrate her time growing up in poverty with her then teenage mother Mandy Teefey.
“My mother gave up everything for me and worked three jobs,” Gomez said in 2017 interview of E! Entertainment.
Teefey, then 16, gave birth to Gomez in 1992 in a “a really rough neighborhood” from 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.
Tefey detailed her daughter’s early fascination with acting New York Times in 2017: “She came with me to one of my rehearsals and sat still for the whole thing, not moving. On the way home she was quiet, and then she says, “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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When she was just 10 years old, Selena made her acting debut in Barney and friends, five years later, she rose to fame with her starring role in Disney’s Emmy-winning series Wizards of Waverly Placewhich earned her a total of approximately $3 million, according to Cosmopolitan. She then switched to music as the leading lady of the pop band Selena Gomez and the scene before launching a successful solo career with her hit album Stars dancingwhich one arranged No. 1.
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Today, Gomez has an impressive resume: three studio albums, nine top-10 pop hits, 44 singles (half of them platinum or gold) and two Grammy nominations.
Interestingly enough, acting and singing don’t make up the bulk of Gomez’s fortune.
According to Bloombergmusic tours only accounted for less than 5% of Gomez’s net worth, while album and record sales were less than 2% – unlike her close friend Taylor Swift, who reached billionaire status in October 2023, mainly thanks to her music and concerts.
