Music, of course, is just one world in which Kardashian West has worked her magic. She has not only leveraged her role as history’s greatest reality show star into unparalleled influence in social media, fashion and beauty, but established herself as a Silicon Valley power player, standing to earn hundreds of millions of dollars in 2016 from her blockbuster apps Kimoji, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and the Kim Kardashian West Official App, which provides subscribers with exclusive content about, well, you know who. And she’s not just a businesswoman — she’s a mother of two with an African-American husband, biracial kids and a dazzling work-life balance, a woman who glamorously models a distinctly modern American life. She’s even taking steps into politics, endorsing Hillary Clinton and recently placing a full-page ad in The New York Times challenging denials that Turkey’s early 20th-century slaughter of Armenians was genocide (an issue of great importance to her late Armenian-American father, Robert Kardashian).
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The conventional wisdom about Kardashian West is that she’s famous for doing nothing, and that her world-conquering celebrity is a symptom of the cratering of civilization as perilous as Brexit or the popularity of stuffed-crust pizza. But of course that’s not really true. If anything, Kardashian West means so much to so many people — 82.9 million Instagram followers, 48 million on Twitter, 10 million U.S. viewers of her show each week, the countless fans who have driven her apps to the top of the Apple charts — because she does so many things, and does each of them so well.
“She multitasks on a whole other level,” says Kardashian West’s mother, Kris Jenner.
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Kardashian West’s iPhone, which has an old photo of her nestled in Kanye’s arms as its lockscreen, buzzes. She picks up. “Speaking of the devil!” she says brightly, before shifting to a huskier register and adding, “Or the angel.” She pauses to listen, then explains to Kanye, who is on the other end and clearly confused: “I was just talking about you, and I was like ‘speaking of the devil,’ and then I’m like, actually, ‘the angel.’ Wait, babe, I’m in an interview. You need ... OK, Naomi just sent over her new management’s number. OK, OK. Calling her right now. Bye.”
“Fashion week,” she explains, when she hangs up. The West family is camped out in New York for a chunk of August and September both for the Yeezy show and because it’s a convenient hub for Kanye’s East Coast tour dates. At home in Los Angeles, they live in a gated community in Bel Air, but are close to finishing renovations on a house in Calabasas, down the block from her mom’s place -- convenient both for babysitting purposes and because it’s the main location for the TV show. Here in New York, the couple still owns Kanye’s pre-marriage apartment, but it’s too small for their family, so they made a deal with Airbnb to provide a five-story place in Chelsea in exchange for social media posts. The apartment, she says, is “the sickest.”