Hailey Bieber Is a Great Entrepreneur. She Did Not Make $1 Billion This Week.

30.05.2025, 19:13 allure.com

When model Hailey Bieber was on the cover of Allure introducing her soon-to-launch skin care line called Rhode, she told us that her biggest hope for the brand was that someone might pick it up and not know it's hers: “That would be my dream, for it to actually surprise people.” And what a surprise we all got this week when Bieber announced she’d sold her brand to E.L.F. Beauty only three years later. Even more unexpected than this accelerated time frame, though, was the amount she sold it for, according to Wednesday’s press release: $1 billion.

Later that afternoon, we weren’t surprised to see news headlines and user-generated TikTok videos swirling, mostly jumping on that B-word: Many said that Hailey Bieber sold Rhode for a billion bucks, or that she was set to earn a billion dollars from the sale of the brand. Several outlets went so far as to declare that Bieber is a billionaire now, implying that the announcement of this deal triggered a direct deposit of a nine-digit figure to her checking account.

In the headline for our interview with Bieber this week, we referred to the value of the deal as being “more money than we could ever dream of.” Definitely accurate! In a video posted to our social media accounts, our content director Kara McGrath stated the brand was sold for “more than half a billion.” Also accurate! Yet commenters were quick to respond, telling us we got the number wrong. But there’s a reason we didn’t say this is a full-on billion-dollar acquisition (at least not yet).

After we looked at the transactional details laid out in the press release, we realized we wouldn’t be 100 percent comfortable in stating that Bieber had sold Rhode for $1 billion. It describes the deal as being “comprised of $800 million of consideration payable at closing [the second quarter of Fiscal 2026] in a combination of cash and stock, subject to customary adjustments, and an additional potential earnout consideration of $200 million based on the future growth of the brand over a three-year timeframe.” Since $200 million of that one billion dollars is hypothetical, we paused before putting “$1 billion” in our headlines and social content.

Hailey Bieber at the the Rhode UK launch party in 2023.

And that $800 million figure itself, as stated in the release, is a combination of “$600 million of cash and $200 million, or approximately 2.6 million shares, of newly issued shares of E.L.F. Beauty common stock issued to existing equity holders of Rhode, subject to certain customary purchase price adjustments.”

So, as fun as it is to imagine, the CEO of E.L.F. didn’t show up to Bieber’s office with a suitcase full of cash. And in general, the deal—though very lucrative for Bieber—won’t make the automatic impact on her wallet that some people seem to think will. Even if the deal nets out to a billion dollars (or more, with soaring E.L.F. stock!), in the end, this does not make Bieber a billionaire. She is one of the many people who work for (or invested in) Rhode who will be getting a payout.

Regardless of precisely how much this young phenom of a brand ultimately sells for, it’s a brilliant move for both Rhode and E.L.F. Rhode makes great products (two of them have won Best of Beauty awards) beloved by its consumers, and Bieber has been able to infuse the brand with a cool factor that many companies have tried and failed to replicate. It’s a cool that has translated to spectacular sales numbers, as we learned this week: $212 in net sales (woah) over the last 12 months—and that’s with less than a dozen products and so far only direct-to-consumer distribution (the brand is entering Sephora this fall). Meanwhile, E.L.F., clearly, has a ton of cash, which they can now use to supercharge those already impressive sales and to have Hailey and her serious beauty influence on their team.

So does the ultimate, definitive, exact number really matter when, at the end of the day, Bieber and her partners are still bringing in amounts of money most of us will never see in a lifetime? Maybe not. But at Allure, we’re committed to choosing our words clearly and carefully—whether we’re covering a financial transaction or skin care terminology or sustainable packaging claims.

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