The dumb blonde act was a business move. Paris Hilton’s been running the game for decades.
PublishedNovember 17, 2025 7:40 PM EST•UpdatedNovember 17, 2025 7:46 PM EST
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Paris Hilton is an American success story. A self-made one if you let her tell it. That claim has rubbed a lot of people who disagree with her the wrong way, but is she wrong?
The 44-year-old is an heiress whose great-grandfather, Conrad Hilton, founded the Hilton Hotels chain. But what good is sharing the last name of a hotel magnate really?
Paris Hilton attended the 2025 GQ Men Of The Year party at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images)
It was Paris who started modeling, then made a name for herself as a socialite and the original influencer. She was the one who got out of bed and landed a reality show.
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She didn’t sit around and live off of her family hotel money. She got busy. She was at events, she was flashing photographers (remember those days?), and she appeared in a sex tape. Nobody else did those things for her.
Paris didn’t find success by mistake. She hasn’t been a model, socialite, reality TV star, influencer, singer, DJ, and entrepreneur all off of her family name. She’s not who many people think she is.
“I’m not a dumb blonde. I’m just very good at pretending to be one,” she told The Sunday Times during a recent interview. “No one really knew the real me. And I always knew there was so much more to me.”
If she was just a dumb blonde, she might have needed a handout to create her company, 11:11 Media. A $1 billion business, according to her, which has 25 employees. She didn’t. Like everything else, she did that herself too.
Paris Hilton Went From Party Girl to Billion-Dollar Businesswoman
“I’m self-made,” Paris said. “Like, I’ve done this all on my own. No one’s ever given me anything in my entire life.”
You don’t have to take her word for it. Who did Sydney Sweeney go party with after calling off her wedding earlier this year? Yep, Paris. That’s part of what she’s built all on her own.
Still not convinced?
What if her billionaire grandfather, Barron, said as much before he died in 2019? He left 97 percent of his wealth to their family charity foundation and, despite being close to her, he left nothing to Paris.
Nothing except for this, which, how could you put a dollar amount on this?
“We were extremely close and we would always have lunches and dinners, and he would always say to me, ‘Paris, you work harder than any CEO I know,’” she said of her late grandfather.
“And he’s, like, ‘I used to be known as Barron Hilton but now I’m known as Paris Hilton’s grandpa.’ We would always laugh about it.”
The haters aren’t going to like that. It flies in the face of everything they thought they knew about that hot blonde influencer who they assumed was dumb.
The one who had a reality show, was at all the parties and then started DJing at some point. She made up words along the way, and the most important takeaway from all this is that she did it all by herself.
She’s not the only heiress out there, but she is the only Paris Hilton.