Hello! You’re reading HeirMail, the only newsletter to come from me (hi) setting a Google Alert for the word “heiress” and then just writing about whatever pops up.
All the very rich white people are eerily connected this week. Plus, Bling Empire!
CTRL+F to jump right to:
Anna Shay, et al.
This toilet paper heiress knows why she was addicted to drugs
Nicky Hilton’s even richer sister-in-law takes us somewhere just, very unexpected, to me.
From the rest of the alert: Annabel Yao backfires, a victory for our water rage girl, FPB check in, Gloria Vanderbilt in Alabama, Shloka Mehta’s wealthy baby, Anna Delvey has a BLOG, the heiress who shacked up with Gillian Anderson’s ex
“Richest Bling Empire Cast Members, Ranked,” The Cinemaholic (thank you, Cinemaholic)
“Bling Empire heirs: This is exactly where all their family money comes from,” The Tab (putting me out of an unpaid volunteer job, dang)
“Anna Shay: 5 Things To Know About TheHeiress Who Is The Breakout Star Of ‘BlingEmpire,’” Hollywood Life
“Who Is Anna Shay On Netflix's 'Bling Empire'? Know About Her Net Worth & Personal Life,” Republic World
“Everything You Need to Know About Anna Shay, Bling Empire's Reigning Matriarch,” Popsugar
“Who Is Cherie Chan From Bling Empire And What Is Her Net Worth?,” Nicki Swift
As if I was going to skip Bling Empire, it is all over the alert this week. Six stories, geez!
If you’re unfamiliar, this is a Netflix reality show that’s kind of like if the Great Gatsby was told through the eyes of a stupid-hot Korean adoptee, and East Egg was the richest Asian circles of LA, and Gatsby was a 60-year-old Russian-Japanese weapons heiress, and the eyes of Dr. TJ Eckleberg were a penis pump, or something. I watched the whole thing today while writing this (commitment!!!) and yes, it is mostly very fun.
If this show was actually a part of the Crazy Rich Asians book series it makes reference to (which should have more volumes than Bridgerton, please) Kevin Krieder’s biological father would be like, the Samsung guy. I don’t want to spend too much time on him because he’s not an heiress — he’s not even rich! — and also it’s embarrassing how often this newsletter about rich women is horny but like, hey.
He’s just smart enough to know to play dumb and that’s a great quality in a man!! He moved from Philly to LA to model and became friends with Kane Lim, the lowkey secretive materialist Buddhist king of cheek implants, and blah blah blah other rich people blah blah Anna Shay exists! Our Gatsby. Our Baby Jane? Our icon.
This sounds mean, and maybe it is, but I mean it: I enjoy how very, very rich, slightly older women often choose to look like Janice from Dr. Teeth’s band. I do get it; sorry to my childhood hero Miss Piggy, but Janice’s is the most luxurious muppet look, at least facially. Anna Shay has this face, and so does Donatella Versace, and so does Adrienne Maloof! These blondes, of pretty disparate backgrounds, could be triplets.
Prove to me this isn’t Adrienne Maloof, I’ll wait. | @annashay93’s Instagram
Anna is great at being rich (dresses in a princess gown and tiaras, buys Kevin stuff for fun and flashing, full of mind games and arbitrary rules, married four times, seems perpetually buzzed). Every outlet repeats the same handful of facts about her: Popsugar and Hollywood Life both link to a Buzzfeed article about her son’s bong collection, and say one of her favorite charities is the George Lopez Foundation (yes that George Lopez). Her father was a billionaire arms industrialist named Edward Albert Shay, the late CEO of Pacific Architects and Engineers (PAE).
With her brother Allen, Anna sold her fathers company to Lockheed Martin, which sold it to private equity firm Lindsay Goldberg (sounds like a girl who didn’t invite you to her bat mitzvah, super is not), which sold it to another PE firm, Platinum Equity. So Anna is not, to be clear, the child of like some under-the-table arms dealer, as I had strangely assumed; the money is from good-old-sanctioned mega weapons, CIA services and shit, which I think might be worse.
A bunch of the cast are maybe heiresses, maybe not: Kim Lee, a DJ with Instagram face and no accountability. Kelly Mi Li, a divorcee in a deeply upsetting dynamic with a horrid former Power Ranger. Jamie Xie, a 22-year-old whose dad is in cybersecurity. A pregnant ex-Japanese pop star from a denim family named Cherie Chan whose very sweet, big time furniture company dude doesn’t want to marry her. (She also owns a company called Religion Tequila, as per Nicki Swift, as per Bustle.) And then there’s Christine Chiu, a super-competitive doctor’s wife who tries to come at Anna with a weapon known as high jewelry (this Worthy article uses the old “you know it when you see it”). Her husband’s family can be traced back to the Song Dynasty and their fertility issues can be traced back to his sperm.
Estimated net worth(s):
All according to The Cinemaholic, we have Anna Shay at $600 million, Cherie Chan (with her other half Jessey Lee) at $200 million, Christine Chu and her dynastic doctor at $80 million, and Jamie Xie at $50 million.
Popbuzz claims controlling Power Ranger Andrew Gray is worth $2 million. Despite reports, Kevin is not worth $10 million dollars. Or he is, who knows.
I cannot beat the phrase “now-clean loo roll heiress.” Both of the Wikipedia links that shore this up are broken so ???, but since Daily Mail didn’t explain further, that valued resource claims that this refers to the fact that Davinia Taylor’s father “ran the AM Paper toilet roll factory in Skelmersdale.”
Davinia’s actually an actress, having been on the soap opera Hollyoaks, and TV presenter, but it seems she’s mostly famous for being part of the Primrose Hill “set” or “gang.” That means she was friends with Kate Moss, Jude Law and his ex Sadie Frost, and the Gallagher brothers in the ‘90s. As indicated by “now clean,” she did a lot of substances. She was also, as the DM mentions repeatedly in text and captions, married to a man named Dave Gardner who is best friends with David Beckham (they don’t mention the sports agent is Liv Tyler’s current partner; like, I’m sorry, respect American dynasties and Architectural Digest greatness?).
Doing blow with Oasis is a kind of biohacking too, if you think about it | @davinataylor’s Instagram
Anyways, this insanely brief but compelling article is all about how she says she has ADHD, and was self-medicating with booze, etc. Her diagnosis is maybe not so official, as she says, “I have so many of the symptoms and always have had. If I do have it then the alcohol was working like a dopamine trigger, much like the stimulants used in medication for the condition” (emphasis mine). As per her Instagram, she’s very into biohacking now.
It’s weird how some people get to be rich and beautiful and famous and lead probably pretty fun lives (Kate Moss hangs!!), but they also have to drag around things like “now-clean loo roll heiress.” I mean, not a bad deal, probably, would take.
Estimated net worth: $18 million, as per Famousintro.com.
“10 ways to make heiress' low-key animal print look work in hot weather,” Stuff
“Paris and Nicky Hilton snubbed starring in Sex and the City and now bitterly regret it,” The Mirror
“Paris Hilton Shares Throwback Photos at 18 Following Alleged Boarding School Abuse,” Entertainment Tonight
Let’s start with Kate Rothschild, who took me on a tiny roller coaster of “feeling like an asshole” in an article with the lede “finally a glimmer of light for banking heir Kate Rothschild and her partner Paul Forkan,” and then a much longer roller coaster of “everyone rich, ever, is related.”
Kate is part of the famous and arguably infamous (especially to conspiracy theorists) family that Nicky Hilton married into, one of the richest families in history, and also in 2019 her 15-year-old daughter Iris was killed in a quad bike accident on her father’s farm. It’s wrenching. The Daily Mail mentions that Kate has paid her daughter tribute on Instagram, and now I see that her IG is private, which seems like the wise thing to do when posting about your late child results in blogs.
Kate is pregnant now, which is the glimmer. In the past, she hasn’t been quite as invisible to the tabs as her brother hot James. She’s in senior management at Jay-Z’s Roc Nation — in the past she’s dated “bad boy rappers” — she’s been, as one always seems to be, robbed. Her ex-husband Ben, from whom she had a very online divorce, is the brother of her sister Alice’s husband Zac, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers style. (Zac is a British Conservative party politician; Zac and Ben’s late father James Goldsmith was a billionaire and proto-Brexiteer. Their sister is Jemima Khan, who shows up later.)
Kate Rothschild (L) with ex-sister-in-law Jemima Khan | @gregwilliamsphotography
But here it the thing that has derailed me: Kate, Alice, and hot James, their parentage. Their dad was a Rothschild, of course, we know that — but their mother was a Guinness! Of the tragic Guinnesses! Which means their extremely distant cousins also tragically lost an incredibly young heiress also on family property, just last year.
Kate, Alice, and James’s mom is Anita Patience Guinness. Anita’s sister Sabrina is married to playwright Tom Stoppard, who wrote Arcadia, and Shakespeare in Love. So, Tom Stoppard is actually Nicky Hilton’s uncle-in-law?
Nicky pops up three times this week, twice for wearing clothes well, besting sister Paris Hilton by one. They share billing in a story about how they were supposed to play Samantha’s neighbors on Sex and the City but didn’t get on the plane to New York. (Paris also posted photos following her time at an abusive boarding school; a situation that deserves its own lengthy breakdown.)
I’m sorry, James Rothschild is a Guinness; I feel like I discovered a new element. I may never recover from learning that my richest crush ever is surprise Irish (surprisrish), but this does explain the red hair.
Estimated Net Worth: Nicky’s at $50 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth, which says that her dad left “only 3%” of his wealth to his wife, children, and grandchildren. But! They also say, “Today, the combined net worth of the Rothschild family is estimated at $400 billion, with some estimates reaching as high as $1 trillion.” Kate’s at $900 million, according to something called Biographics World. Paris is coming in at $300 million, according to Express.
From the rest of the Alert
Look, I’m not saying that we beat the Daily Mail, but we talked about “Huawei princess” Annabel Yao’s pop career last week, and they just got to it. Annabel’s a few places this week — DM, the South China Morning Post, the Economic Times from the India Times — because she followed up last week’s documentary with a pop single called “Backfire” and yes, everyone made exactly the jokes you’d expect. The danger of naming! She says, “I know I’m not the most gifted person, but I will work harder to achieve my best.”
The activist investment firm that’s been trying to oust Korean Air (ahem, water rage) heiress Cho Hyun-min is mad she got a promotion. I can’t tell if it’s a little bit sexist bullshit that Hyun-min and her sister have to carry these monikers around forever or if it’s extremely earned because it’s unacceptable to throw water at people, obviously. Both things feel maybe true! The world might still be a rich tapestry, even in the boardrooms of airlines run by nepotism!
Francesca Packer Barham did pilates with her pilates boyfriend and they took selfies. She captioned the story saying that the exercise “nearly killed” her.
The Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama has a bunch of Gloria Vanderbilt’s art. Anderson Cooper’s mom (gotta mention, sorry) was known as a denim designer, but was also an artist herself. It also includes pictures of her as the curator, a friend of Gloria’s, reportedly says “she was the most photographed woman of her time.” Which, maybe makes sense because wow:
Gloria Vanderbilt in 1959 on The United States Steel Hour. |Wikimedia Commons, United States Steel Company
Shloka Mehta, the heiress to a diamond company, Rosy Blue, is now the mom to “one of the world’s richest newborns,” according to this article from the South China Morning Post. It asks, “What kind of life will baby Prithvi Akash Ambani lead?” Seems like a materially quite full one! Shloka’s husband’s dad is the dude in charge of one of the most valuable companies in India, Reliance Industries Limited. The article also says the baby can look forward to being friends with Priyanka Chopra! What if the baby doesn’t want share the spotlight?
Anna Anna fabulous Anna, Anna Sorokin, you’re so outrageous. The fake heiress has a website and the Shonda show is coming soon! According to this Stylist piece about the show, while Julia Garner (yay!) plays Anna, Anna Chulmsky (great!) is playing a reporter trying to get the story (oh no). Seems like there’ll be a whole fictional storyline with a cute husband (Anders Holm) and mentor (Anna Deavere-Smith, star of TV’s greatest ever show) for the reporter and woof, just do the truth, don’t make shit up. The website’s much better news — it’s called Anna Delvey Diaries (great name) and you can send her cryptocurrency. Plus, she blogs, writing “Being in prison mostly feels like extended quarantining, only with a bunch of murderers, and we still can get our hair done.” Good lede! And good brag!
And finally, the promised return of Jemima Khan, Kate Rothschild’s ex-sister-in-law (but still her sister’s sister-in-law), who was once married to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, and also dated Hugh Grant and Russell Brand. What’s she doing? Living with Gillian Anderson’s very very recent ex-partner, Peter Morgan, who created The Crown, which Gillian was just on. Gillian is reportedly “bemused.” Ahh! Don’t mess with Gillian Anderson embodying Margaret Thatcher’s spirit, Jemima! Damn, do you want to die?