Kim Kardashian, the reality star who keeps auditioning for the jobs that judge her hardest

Kim Kardashian

Photo: Eva Rinaldi / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 21, 1980 Los Angeles
Occupation	Fashion Designer
Awards	Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actress

Kim Kardashian has spent the past few years walking into rooms designed to judge her. Bar examiners in California grade her papers without caring who she is. Television critics reviewed her first starring role in a scripted drama with rare unanimity, and not the kind she wanted. Investors, meanwhile, have valued the shapewear company she co-founded at five billion dollars. The verdicts do not agree with one another. That disagreement is the most revealing thing about her now.

She is still, before anything else, the woman from Keeping Up with the Kardashians, the E! series that turned a Los Angeles family’s arguments into an exportable format and showed a generation of brands how attention converts into sales. The question her current career keeps asking is whether the person that show manufactured can be separated from the work she now wants judged on its own terms. So far the answer depends on who is grading.

Her father, Robert Kardashian, was a Los Angeles lawyer who later sat on O.J. Simpson’s defense team; her mother, Kris, remarried in 1991 to the Olympic decathlon champion then known as Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn. Kimberly Noel Kardashian, the second of four Kardashian children, arrived in that household on October 21, 1980, in Los Angeles, and went to Marymount High School, a Catholic girls’ school in the city. The law was in the house long before it was in her plans.

Her first jobs were in clothes. She spent about four years at Body, a boutique in Encino, and by 2003 was styling the singer Brandy; from 2006 she worked as a stylist for Paris Hilton, whose orbit made her a fixture of the paparazzi pages. In February 2007 a sex tape she had recorded in 2003 with the singer Ray J leaked, and she later settled with the distributor, Vivid Entertainment, for a reported five million dollars. She was famous before she had a job title that explained why.

Keeping Up with the Kardashians premiered on E! in October 2007 and ran until June 2021, 294 episodes in all. Its real subject was the economics of being watched: Kris managed the family, the family sold access to its own crises, and every crisis came with a product attached. Kim was its center of gravity, and she turned that position into a mobile game, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, which arrived in 2014 and let players buy their way up the same ladder she had climbed. The franchise moved to Hulu as The Kardashians in April 2022.

The audience became her first customer base. KKW Beauty and KKW Fragrance launched in 2017, and in 2020 Coty paid 200 million dollars for a 20 percent stake in the beauty business. In 2019 she co-founded SKIMS with Jens Grede, after first announcing the shapewear line as Kimono and abandoning the name within weeks under criticism that she was claiming a Japanese garment. Forbes counted her as a billionaire in April 2021. SKIMS became the NBA’s official underwear partner in 2023, launched NikeSKIMS with Nike in September 2025, and that November raised 225 million dollars in a round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives that valued it at five billion. The beauty side went the other way: SKKN by Kim, the 2022 relaunch of KKW Beauty, was bought out by SKIMS in 2025, Coty’s stake included and sold at a loss, and then wound down. She also co-founded SKKY Partners, a private equity firm, in 2022 with the former Carlyle Group partner Jay Sammons, and stepped back as its managing partner in December 2024.

The law is the part of her life least compatible with celebrity, which may be why she keeps at it. In 2018 she lobbied the White House for the release of Alice Marie Johnson, a grandmother serving life for a first-time nonviolent drug offense, and Johnson’s sentence was commuted that June. A year later Vogue reported that she was reading law in California, the apprenticeship route that bypasses law school. She passed the first-year exam known as the baby bar in December 2021 on her fourth attempt, completed the apprenticeship in 2025 and failed the full California bar exam that July, telling followers in November that she had come close. Reports this spring said she would skip both 2026 sittings.

Her acting is where the gap between audience and critics is widest. The Golden Raspberry Awards named her worst supporting actress for Tyler Perry‘s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor in 2013. A decade later Ryan Murphy cast her as Siobhan Corbyn, a publicist, in American Horror Story: Delicate, then built All’s Fair around her as Allura Grant, a divorce lawyer who walks out of a male-run firm to open her own. Critics savaged the first season, which holds an approval rating in single digits on Rotten Tomatoes. Hulu renewed it anyway, because it was the platform’s biggest scripted debut in three years. That split is the honest reading of her career. She has never needed reviewers to win, and she keeps choosing the fields where reviewers hold the keys.

The exposure has had a price. In October 2016, during Paris Fashion Week, armed men tied her up in a rented residence and took jewelry worth about ten million dollars; she stopped posting her whereabouts in real time, and in 2025 she testified in person at the trial in Paris, where eight defendants were convicted. Her private life has run on the same public clock. She married the producer Damon Thomas at nineteen, divorced the basketball player Kris Humphries after a marriage of 72 days in 2011, and was married to Kanye West from 2014 until she filed for divorce in 2021. They share four children, North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm. Since early 2026 she has been in a public relationship with the Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton.

The current calendar is crowded. The eighth season of The Kardashians began on Hulu on October 8, 2026, with Disney+ carrying it outside the United States. Still to come is The Fifth Wheel, a Netflix comedy shot in Los Angeles this year, directed by Eva Longoria and written by Paula Pell and Janine Brito, in which she stars opposite Nikki Glaser and which she also produces; it is her first leading film role, and Netflix has not yet set a release date. Forbes put her fortune at 1.9 billion dollars in June 2026.

On November 4, Allura Grant returns when the second season of All’s Fair opens on Hulu with three episodes, alongside Naomi Watts, Niecy Nash-Betts, Glenn Close and the new addition Cauã Reymond. The next verdict on Kim Kardashian will arrive the way it always does, in two versions that never quite agree.

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Tags: actors, business, Ryan Murphy, ceos, The Kardashians, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kim Kardashian, All's Fair, businesswomen, Kris Jenner

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