Kris Jenner, the mother who turned her family into a business plan

Kris Jenner

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 5, 1955 San Diego
Occupation	Businesswoman, talent manager and television producer

In almost every season of her family’s television shows there is a scene in which one of the daughters asks Kris Jenner a question and gets the answer from her manager. Mother and manager are the same woman, and that has always been the entire proposition. Jenner calls herself a “momager”, a word she has turned into a job description, and she has spent close to two decades proving that a family can be run like a company. Nobody has settled whether that is a compliment. She described the method herself in her memoir: “I started to look at our careers like pieces on a chessboard… Every day, I woke up and walked into my office and asked myself, ‘What move do you need to make today?'” The board is still on the table, and she is still the one moving the pieces.

Kristen Mary Houghton was born and raised in San Diego. Her parents divorced when she was seven, and she and her younger sister Karen were raised by their mother, Mary Jo “MJ” Shannon, who owned a children’s clothing store, Shannon & Company, where the teenage Kris worked behind the counter. Her stepfather, the businessman Harry Shannon, helped raise both girls. She graduated from Clairemont High School, and two years later her father, the engineer Robert Houghton, was killed in a car crash in Mexico; she was nineteen. She then spent about a year as an American Airlines flight attendant.

In 1978 she married Robert Kardashian, a Los Angeles lawyer, and over the following decade had four children: Kourtney, Kim, Khloé and Rob. That marriage ended in 1991, and a month after the divorce she married the Olympic decathlon champion Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn Jenner. Kendall arrived in 1995 and Kylie in 1997. During the 1990s she was already selling on television, pitching exercise equipment on QVC. Then came the O. J. Simpson case. Jenner had been a close friend of Nicole Brown Simpson, while her former husband joined Simpson’s defense team, a split that ran straight through her private life. She named her daughter Kendall Nicole after her murdered friend, and two decades later Selma Blair played Jenner in The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story.

The idea that made her famous was her own. In 2007 she took a family reality show to Ryan Seacrest, who ran a production company and had The Osbournes in mind as a model. E! bought it, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians premiered that October with Jenner as executive producer. It ran for twenty seasons, until 2021, and kept generating spin-offs built around individual children, from Kourtney and Kim Take New York to Life of Kylie. What the show sold, week after week, was attention, and Jenner understood earlier than most network executives that attention could be turned into inventory.

The conversions came quickly. She ran a children’s boutique, Smooch, with Kourtney from 2004 until 2009, launched a clothing line with QVC in 2011 and published her memoir, Kris Jenner… and All Things Kardashian, the same year. Not everything worked: Kris, a daytime talk show, ran for a six-week trial on Fox stations in the summer of 2013 and was not picked up. The decisive move came with her youngest. In 2014 she and Kylie set up the company that became Kylie Cosmetics, in partnership with Seed Beauty; the first lip kits went on sale in November 2015, and by the end of 2016 the business had passed 300 million dollars in revenue. In November 2019 Coty paid 600 million dollars for 51 percent of it, a deal that valued the brand at about 1.2 billion. Jenner has guided the launches of her other children’s companies too, among them KKW Beauty, Skims, Good American and 818 Tequila.

The same machine is what her critics keep coming back to. The family’s fame predates the show by a few months: a sex tape of Kim with the singer Ray J surfaced in 2007, and the claim that Kris engineered its release has followed her ever since. She and Kim denied it in court declarations filed in Los Angeles in March 2026. That fight is now a lawsuit. In October 2025 mother and daughter sued Ray J for defamation after he claimed on a livestream that a federal racketeering investigation was coming for them; their complaint says no such investigation exists. A judge refused to throw the case out, Ray J appealed and countersued over an earlier settlement, and the court declined to keep those settlement agreements sealed. Her second marriage left its own counter-narrative. Caitlyn Jenner has said that “twenty percent was gender and 80 percent was the way I was treated”, and Kris publicly objected to Caitlyn’s 2017 memoir. Even her productions split the room: All’s Fair, the Ryan Murphy legal drama starring Kim that Jenner executive-produces, opened in November 2025 to near-universal pans and a 3 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, and still became Hulu‘s biggest scripted original premiere in three years. No episode of her career has made a stronger case that, in her business, reviews are one number among many and not the decisive one.

The past year has also been personal. Jenner turned 70 on November 5, 2025, and celebrated three days later with a James Bond-themed party at the Beverly Hills home of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez. Two months earlier she had fronted her first campaign for MAC Cosmetics, a company that competes directly with her daughters’ beauty brands. In July 2026 she announced the death of her mother at 91. “Today, we said goodbye to my beautiful Mommy MJ,” she wrote. “My mom was the heart of our family.”

Her divorce from Caitlyn Jenner became final in March 2015, and she has been in a relationship with Corey Gamble since around 2014. She has 13 grandchildren, among them North West, and in 2012 she co-founded the California Community Church with pastor Brad Johnson.

The next move is already on screen. The eighth season of The Kardashians premiered on Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ internationally on October 8, 2026, with new episodes every Thursday and a stated theme of “love, reinvention, and what comes next”. A second season of All’s Fair is in the pipeline, and the defamation case against Ray J waits on his appeal. For Jenner the questions are the ones she has always asked herself in the morning, and the answers will once again be televised.

Tags: business, ceos, Reality television, The Kardashians, All's Fair, businesswomen, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kim Kardashian, Kris Jenner, Kylie Jenner

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