Fenty Beauty went on sale on September 8, 2017, in 17 countries on the same day, with 40 shades of Pro Filt’r foundation. It was a 50-50 joint venture between Rihanna and LVMH, built inside Kendo Brands, LVMH’s beauty incubator. By 2018, its first full calendar year, it was pulling in more than $550 million a year, a figure LVMH gave and Forbes used to declare Rihanna a billionaire in 2021. Forbes put the whole brand at a conservative $2.8 billion. Her half alone was worth $1.4 billion on paper.
Nine years later, who owns Fenty Beauty now is a messier question. LVMH is trying to get out.
Reuters reported in October 2025 that the group had hired Evercore to explore a sale of its 50% stake. Sources put the business at $1 billion to $2 billion. That is the part nobody is saying plainly: the number being discussed for the entire company is lower than what Rihanna’s half was valued at five years ago. The buyback story and the markdown story are the same story.
Fenty Beauty is a cosmetics brand founded by Rihanna in 2017 and owned through a 50-50 joint venture between her and LVMH, with day-to-day operations run by LVMH’s Kendo Brands division. As of October 2026, that structure is still in place, but LVMH is in talks to sell its half.
Last updated: October 2026
Quick answers
Who owns Fenty Beauty now? Rihanna owns 50% and LVMH owns 50%, through a joint venture operated by LVMH’s Kendo Brands. LVMH has been trying to sell its half since October 2025, and as of mid-October 2026 no sale has been completed or announced.
Did Rihanna sell Fenty Beauty? No. Every report on the current process describes LVMH selling its half. Rihanna’s 50% stake is not part of the transaction being discussed.
Is Jay-Z buying Fenty Beauty? Not yet, and not all of it. Puck reported that MarcyPen Capital Partners, which Jay-Z co-founded, is near a deal for LVMH’s 50%. MarcyPen declined to comment. Terms have not been reported.
Who owns Fenty Beauty now?
Rihanna and LVMH each own half of Fenty Beauty, and that has been true since launch. Forbes confirmed her 50% ownership in 2021. The brand has never been independently owned, and it has never been wholly owned by Rihanna.
The operating layer matters more than most coverage admits. Fenty Beauty sits inside Kendo Brands, which calls itself a beauty brand incubator and a division of LVMH. Kendo’s portfolio also carries Fenty Skin, Fenty Hair, Fenty Fragrance, OLEHENRIKSEN, KVD Beauty and Lip Lab, and it ships into more than 60 countries. So LVMH does not just hold 50% of the equity. It holds the company that makes the products, negotiates the retail, and runs the supply chain.
That is the detail a buyer has to solve for. Half the cap table is for sale. The operating agreement sitting underneath it is not obviously for sale with it, and no public reporting has described what happens to the Kendo relationship if LVMH exits the equity.
Did LVMH sell Fenty Beauty?
No. LVMH has not sold Fenty Beauty, and as of October 13, 2026, no transaction has been signed or announced. What exists is a year-long sale process and a report that it may be close to finishing.
The timeline is short enough to hold in your head. In October 2025, Reuters reported that LVMH was exploring a sale of its 50% stake and working with Evercore. In June 2026, Beauty Independent reported that MarcyPen had been circling the brand. On October 1, 2026, Puck reported that MarcyPen was near the finish line, with a source saying an agreement could be signed within three to four weeks.
Three to four weeks from October 1 lands in late October. That window is still open. Treat any headline claiming Jay-Z owns Fenty Beauty as wrong until LVMH or MarcyPen says otherwise, because neither has.
What is MarcyPen Capital Partners?
MarcyPen Capital Partners is a consumer-focused investment firm with roughly $900 million under management, formed when Jay-Z’s Marcy Venture Partners merged with the investment arm of Pendulum Holdings in September 2024. It is not a stranger to Rihanna’s business.
Marcy Venture Partners was founded in 2018 by Jay-Z, Roc Nation’s former CEO Jay Brown, and Walden VC’s Larry Marcus. It raised $85 million in 2020 and $325 million the year after, reaching about $600 million in assets. Pendulum Holdings was founded in 2019 by Robbie Robinson, a former financial adviser to Barack Obama, and D’Rita Robinson. The combined firm has been raising a $250 million second opportunities fund.
Here is the part that reframes the deal. Marcy Venture Partners was already an investor in Savage X Fenty, Rihanna’s lingerie company, alongside L Catterton, Neuberger Berman and Advent International. Roc Nation, which Jay-Z founded, manages Rihanna. This is not an arm’s-length financial buyer walking in cold. It is an existing partner in her orbit moving from one Fenty company to another, which is a very different negotiating dynamic than a private equity auction.
The Savage X Fenty cap table is worth a second look for another reason. Its $115 million Series B in February 2021 was led by L Catterton, the consumer fund backed by LVMH, at a $1 billion valuation. A $125 million round led by Neuberger Berman followed, taking total funding to $310 million. So LVMH money has sat on both sides of Rihanna’s businesses for years, and MarcyPen has sat next to it. The firms in this deal have been in the same rooms for half a decade.
Celebrity capital flowing into celebrity brands is its own pattern now. We have covered why celebrities are putting money into health startups instead of beauty brands, and the Fenty talks read as the counterweight: the money that already understands beauty is buying the assets the strategics want off their books.
How much is Fenty Beauty worth in 2026?
Sources cited by Reuters valued Fenty Beauty between $1 billion and $2 billion in October 2025, against roughly $450 million in 2024 net sales. That is a multiple of about 2.2x to 4.4x revenue, and it is the single most informative number in this story.
Run it against a real comparable. When e.l.f. Beauty agreed to buy rhode in May 2025, it paid $800 million at closing plus a $200 million earnout for a brand doing $212 million in net sales over the prior twelve months. e.l.f. put that at about 3.8x trailing net sales. Apply 3.8x to Fenty’s $450 million and you get roughly $1.7 billion, which lands inside the reported range.
So the market is not punishing Fenty. It is pricing it like what it now is: a large, mature brand rather than a compounding one. rhode was three years old and growing when it sold at 3.8x. Fenty is nine years old and smaller than it was in 2018, when LVMH reported more than $550 million in annual revenue. Same multiple, very different trajectory.
The gap against the 2021 mark is where founders should look. Forbes valued the brand at $2.8 billion in August 2021. The current range tops out at $2 billion and starts at $1 billion. On paper, somewhere between $800 million and $1.8 billion of enterprise value evaporated in four years without a single bad headline about the product.
How Fenty’s structure compares to other celebrity beauty deals
| Brand | Founder’s stake | Outside owner | Reported value | What the founder kept |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fenty Beauty (2017) | 50%, Rihanna | LVMH, 50%, operated by Kendo | $1B to $2B range for the whole company | Her half, plus creative control. Not the operating company |
| rhode (2022) | Majority, Hailey Bieber | e.l.f. Beauty, full acquisition | $800M at close plus $200M earnout | A title. Founder, Chief Creative Officer, Head of Innovation |
| Kylie Cosmetics (2015) | 49% after the sale, Kylie Jenner | Coty, 51% control | $600M for 51%, announced November 2019 | A minority position and creative duties, not control |
| Savage X Fenty (2018) | About 30%, Rihanna, per Forbes 2021 | L Catterton, Neuberger Berman, MarcyPen and others | $310M raised, $1B valuation in February 2021 | A diluted stake across rounds, plus the brand name |
Read the right-hand column twice. In three of the four, the founder ended up with a smaller share, a job title, or both. Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty position is the outlier, and it is the outlier because she took 50% at formation rather than selling into a round later. That decision was made in 2017 and it is still paying her in 2026. Our breakdown of the biggest celebrity brand launches of 2026 shows how few founders now get those terms at the start.
Is Fenty owned by Sephora?
No. Sephora does not own Fenty Beauty. Sephora and Fenty Beauty share the same parent on one side of the cap table, because LVMH owns Sephora outright and owns half of Fenty Beauty, but Sephora’s role in the brand is retail, not ownership.
That distinction is less comforting than it sounds. Fenty launched into Sephora on day one and scaled through its shelves, which is the single biggest reason the 2017 launch worked the way it did. A brand that is half-owned by the company that owns its primary retailer has a structural advantage right up until it has a structural problem.
Nobody has reported that Sephora will drop Fenty if LVMH sells. But the shared interest that made the shelf space automatic goes away with the equity. A new financial owner negotiates for that placement instead of inheriting it, and that negotiation has never had to happen before. The same dependency shows up in celebrity licensing deals: we broke down how the Ice Spice and Revlon fragrance deal was actually structured, where the partner controls manufacturing and distribution and the artist controls the name.
The surface area has grown since 2017, too. Kendo’s own site now lists Fenty Skin, Fenty Hair and Fenty Fragrance alongside Fenty Beauty. That is four product lines riding the same retail relationship and the same operating company. A sale of the equity does not automatically touch any of them, but it does mean four lines are now exposed to a renegotiation that one 2017 handshake used to cover.
Why LVMH wants out of a brand it helped build
LVMH’s beauty division stopped growing, and Fenty is a non-core asset in a portfolio being tightened. In its 2025 full-year results published on January 27, 2026, LVMH reported Perfumes and Cosmetics revenue of 8,174 million euros, down 3% as reported with 0% organic growth. Group revenue came in at 80,807 million euros, down 5%.
Profit in that division actually rose 8%, to 727 million euros, on an 8.9% margin. Read those two facts together and the strategy is obvious. LVMH is squeezing margin out of a flat beauty business, and a 50% stake in a joint venture it does not fully control is a reasonable thing to convert into cash. The group signed away DFS’s Greater China business in January 2026 for similar reasons.
None of that is a verdict on Fenty’s products. It is a verdict on where a minority-adjacent beauty JV sits in a 80 billion euro conglomerate that is pruning. Founders misread this constantly. Your strategic partner’s decision to sell is usually about their portfolio math, not your brand. The same logic drives how startup tender offers get timed and priced, where the window opens because of the investor’s needs, not the employee’s.
What founders should take from the Fenty deal
The lesson is not that Rihanna won, and it is not that she lost. It is that she concentrated three separate dependencies in one counterparty and got away with it for nine years because that counterparty stayed aligned.
Count them. LVMH was her capital partner at 50%. LVMH owned Kendo, which operated the business. LVMH owned Sephora, her primary retailer. Equity, operations, distribution. One name on all three lines. For nine years that concentration was pure advantage, and it is why Fenty scaled into 17 countries on launch day instead of fighting for a shelf in year three.
It becomes a risk the moment the partner wants out, because all three unwind at once and the founder negotiates all three from the same weak position. Rihanna is in better shape than most founders would be, since her 50% means she can refuse a buyer she does not want. A founder with 20% could not.
How much power that actually gives her depends on paper nobody outside the deal has seen. Fifty-fifty joint ventures usually carry consent rights, rights of first refusal, or tag-along provisions that govern what each side can do with its half. The Fenty Beauty agreement has never been made public, and neither LVMH nor Rihanna’s team has described it. What is reportable is the arithmetic of the split: a buyer of LVMH’s half gets no control, only a partnership with the person whose name is on the bottle.
Three things to do with this, concretely:
- Separate the lines in your own cap table. If one party is your investor, your manufacturer, and your main channel, write down what happens to each relationship if they sell. Most founders have never asked. Ask before the term sheet, not after.
- Take the percentage at formation, not the check later. Rihanna’s 50% came from the structure of the original joint venture in 2017. rhode’s founder took a majority and sold it. Kylie Jenner sold control at 51% in 2019 and kept 49%. The founder who negotiates hardest at formation does the least negotiating later.
- Price your brand off trailing revenue, not off your peak press cycle. Fenty’s reported range implies 2.2x to 4.4x on $450 million. e.l.f. paid 3.8x for rhode. If you are modeling an exit off a magazine valuation from three years ago, you are modeling the wrong number, and the same multiple discipline applies when selling a small software business.
There is a version of the next few weeks where MarcyPen signs, Rihanna ends up with a partner who already backs her lingerie company and shares her manager, and the whole thing reads as a founder taking her brand back. There is another version where the process stalls, LVMH holds, and the 2025 valuation range becomes the number everyone quotes for years. Both are live right now.
What is already settled is the arithmetic. A brand that did more than $550 million in 2018 did about $450 million in 2024, and the paper value fell from $2.8 billion to a reported ceiling of $2 billion. Rihanna’s half is the reason she still has a seat at the table. It is not the reason the table got smaller. Celebrity brands age, and the ones that do not plan for the aging get repriced by someone else, which is the pattern behind why Sydney Sweeney’s SYRN is struggling despite its sellouts and behind Cardi B’s plan to hand Grow-Good Beauty to her daughter rather than sell it. Ownership is the only variable the founder controls all the way through. Fenty Beauty is the clearest proof of that in the business, in both directions.
For a reminder of what happens without that ownership, read how Jang Wonyoung generated an estimated $1.3 billion in value she did not get paid for.
