On November 5, 1955, Kris Jenner was born in San Diego, California. In 2025, she turned 70. The story of how she went from being born in Southern California in 1955 to managing what may be the most commercially successful family brand in American entertainment history is more fascinating than any one statistic can express, so the number alone falls short of capturing what has transpired over those seven decades.
When Keeping Up with the Kardashians debuted on E! in 2007, the most recognizable version of Kris Jenner emerged. She was fifty-one. Over the course of its fourteen-year run, the show—which she executive produced alongside the episodes in which she appeared—became one of the longest-running and most lucrative reality shows in cable television history. The figures associated with it—viewers, spin-offs, licensing deals, and brand alliances created by its cast—are the kind that business schools evaluate after the fact but hardly forecast beforehand. Kris anticipated it. Or at least she was aware enough of the surroundings to pretend to be aware of them.
What she created is not fully captured by the term “momager,” which became a common abbreviation for her. In addition to overseeing the careers of her children, Kim, Kourtney, Khloé, Rob, Kendall, and Kylie, she also managed the family brand as a whole, creating content, negotiating contracts, and serving as the operational hub of something that had no clear precedent in the way celebrity families had previously operated. When The Kardashians started streaming in 2022, the company switched from E! to Hulu, proving that it had not reached its peak.
Her first marriage to Robert Kardashian, the attorney who rose to national prominence during the O.J. Simpson trial, had four children. Robert Jr., Khloé, Kim, and Kourtney. She wed Olympic decathlete Bruce Jenner, who had become a media star, in between her divorce from Robert Kardashian and her second marriage. Together, they had two children, Kendall and Kylie. Later, Bruce Jenner underwent a transition to become Caitlyn Jenner, which unfolded in the public light with the intricacy that comes with public transitions. The family continued to function as a public entity while overseeing something that was quite private, notwithstanding Kris’s difficult and contentious handling of that time.
By 2026, there will be thirteen grandkids, including North West, Kim’s daughter with Kanye West, who has been pursuing a career in music from a young age. The question of what the third generation of Kardashian-Jenner media production might eventually look like is raised by the generational extension of this family’s public presence, which is already evident enough.
Kris Jenner, who helped transform the industry, is 70 years old and shows no signs of retiring. The Hulu series is still ongoing. The management position is still in place. The thirteen-year-old grandmother goes on. In this context, what is truly intriguing about her age is how little her seventieth birthday resembles what it usually looked like for women in American public life twenty or thirty years ago. She created something without a model, led it through changes that would have put an end to the majority of similar businesses, and reached 70 while the business was still in operation.
