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At 32, Selena Gomez has transformed from Disney Channel sweetheart into a legitimate business powerhouse. While estimates of her wealth vary dramatically—Forbes pegs her net worth at $700 million while Bloomberg suggests $1.3 billion—everyone agrees on one thing: The vast majority of her fortune comes from her cosmetics empire, Rare Beauty, which generates $350-400 million in annual revenue and is valued at $2 billion.

But long before she was building billion-dollar beauty brands, Gomez was making strategic real estate moves that mirror her evolution from teen pop sensation to Hollywood heavyweight. From her first “starter home” purchase at just 19 to co-buying a $35 million Beverly Hills estate with fiancé Benny Blanco, here’s how the Only Murders in the Building star built her impressive real estate portfolio.

Tarzana Starter Home

This wasn’t exactly your typical first-time buyer situation. Fresh off Wizards of Waverly Place and dating a certain Canadian pop star, 19-year-old Gomez purchased her first “starter home” in July 2011 for $2.175 million: a 6,630-square-foot, six-bedroom, nine-bathroom compound on a full acre in Tarzana, California. The traditional-style home features high ceilings, a media room, and amenities like a pool, spa, bocce ball court, basketball court, and even space for a tennis court.

After three years of ownership and some serious upgrades, Gomez listed the property for $3.495 million in 2014, ultimately selling it to rapper Iggy Azalea for $3.45 million.

Fort Worth Mansion

Establishing herself as a pop star following her Disney days, Gomez purchased this 10,000 square-foot mansion in Fort Worth, Texas for $3.5 million in 2015. Not far from her childhood home in Grand Prairie, the six-bedroom, seven-and-a-half bathroom estate sits on over an acre and a half inside a gated community and came with every bell and whistle imaginable: a saltwater pool with a waterslide, an eight-seat movie theater, a tennis/basketball combo court, a putting green, a game room, and professional-grade kitchen appliances.

Despite calling it her “first dream house,” Gomez’s hectic schedule meant she only visited during the holidays. By 2016, she listed it for $3.49 million. After two years on the market and multiple price reductions, she finally sold it in 2018 for $2.7 million.

Studio City Bungalow

Sometimes you need a cozy retreat, and that’s exactly what this single-story Studio City bungalow provided for Gomez while recovering from her kidney transplant in 2017. Purchased for $2.249 million, the 3,500-square-foot, four-bedroom home features herring-bone patterned brick floors, wide-plank oak flooring, and an open kitchen.

Set behind privacy hedges on a half-acre lot, the property includes a pool, fire pit, outdoor kitchen, and guesthouse. She listed it multiple times starting in 2018, eventually selling it in 2020 for $2.368 million.

Encino Mansion

In 2020, Gomez purchased rock legend Tom Petty’s former custom-built estate in Encino, California—an 11,000-square-foot modern lodge—for $4.9 million. Built for Petty and his wife Jane Benyo in 1989, the six-bedroom, 10-bathroom property includes an in-home recording studio, wine cellar, massage room, gym, and rumored secret passageways built by the original owner.

The outdoor space includes fountains, waterfalls, and a gorgeous pool all situated on an acre lot adjacent to Vin Diesel’s spread. Gomez still owns this property, making it her longest-held real estate investment to date.

Beverly Hills Home with Benny Blanco

Newly engaged couple Benny Blanco and Selena Gomez purchased this Spanish-style estate in December 2024 for $35 million. Previously owned by Joker director Todd Phillips, it was designed in 1928 by architect Wallace Neff and has since been restored. The 7,000-square-foot home features seven bedrooms, 12 bathrooms, a library with a spiral staircase, a greenhouse solarium, a gym, private theater, a studio space, and more.

Purchased off-market in the same month they announced their engagement, the property sits on nearly an acre of prime Beverly Hills, California real estate and includes a large pool, a spa, and lush gardens. It was one of Beverly Hill’s biggest real estate transactions of 2024 and marked a new chapter for the couple.

Julia Cancilla is the engagement editor (and resident witch) at ELLE Decor, where she oversees the brand’s social media platforms and writes the monthly ELLE Decoroscope column. She covers design trends, pop culture, and lifestyle through storytelling to explore how our homes reflect who we are. Her work has also appeared in Inked magazine, House Beautiful, Marie Claire, and more. 

Kelly Clarkson had Lizzo on her final episode of Songs & Stories with Kelly Clarkson to talk about the “Good as Hell” singer’s life and career. Interestingly, one of Lizzo’s first building blocks to gaining a musical following was covering Adele’s “Someone Like You” on the piano.

Watch Lizzo’s “Someone Like You” cover here. 

It’s a transcendent version of the track. Lizzo’s vocals sound like they were carved by angels, and her piano-playing skills are just as impressive as her flute ones. Lizzo posted her Adele cover in 2011, when the “Rolling in the Deep” singer hit the pop stratosphere with her 21 album. Lizzo’s take on the song has amassed over 480,000 views on YouTube, but Clarkson didn’t know it existed — which led to a funny, sweet moment on their Songs & Stories episode. 

Read more, below: 

The stealth Lizzo video Kelly Clarkson had no idea existed

As Kelly Clarkson and Lizzo discussed their careers and musical backgrounds, Clarkson brought up their mutual love of Adele’s “Someone Like You.” 

“Oh, someone like me loves this song,” Lizzo said to Clarkson in all earnestness.

RELATED: Steve Martin, Kelly Clarkson, & Nick Jonas Have a Song Together You Didn’t Know

Lizzo was just a little older than 21 when Adele’s 21 album came out. She had just recently graduated from the University of Houston and was performing with various bands in the Minneapolis area and exploring musical styles like rap/R&B, soul-pop, and hip-hop to find her own niche. 

RELATED: Gloria Estefan & Kelly Clarkson’s Voices Are a Sublime Match Singing Carole King

Lizzo told Clarkson she covered “Someone Like You” at the time to get noticed. “There’s also a video of me on YouTube, as a young Lizzo playing it on piano,” she smiled. “It was the first song on piano I learned how to play and sing.” 

Clarkson was floored and admitted that particular video did not turn up in her research prepping for their episode together. Lizzo then joked, “You didn’t lurk hard enough!” 

Cut to 10+ years later: Lizzo’s become a musical icon all her own (and friends with Adele!). 

All four episodes of Songs & Stories with Kelly Clarkson are now available to stream on Peacock.

RELATED: John Legend’s Gripping A Capella ”Rolling in the Deep” Cover Is Basically Flawless

RELATED: Darci Lynne Singing Adele Is as Gripping and Show-Stopping as You’d Expect

Primavera is the Museum of Contemporary Art’s annual spring exhibition featuring selected Australian artists under 35. This year, curator Tim Riley Walsh asks what it means for artists to create in a post-industrial age of reproduction.

Walsh foregrounds a material fascination running through the artists’ works.

Many artists integrate metallurgy into their installations, often using machine fabrication. Traps, cages, monuments, pipes, window frames, carpet and boomerangs appear in the show.

These are not inert objects but create spaces that privilege embodied experience. It is a gesture that resonates in an age when the screen is ubiquitous to daily life.

From fabricated monuments to traps

The tension between touch and industrial manufacture is most evident in Vinall Richardson’s corten steel and copper monoliths.

Each block, scaled up from cardboard maquettes, carries the trace of handmade imperfections. Set against the engineered precision of architectural steel, these marks of inaccuracy break with the exactitude of 1960s’ Minimalism and the emphasis on repetitive, mass-produced forms.

Francis Carmody’s two-part installation turns material toward commodification.

A white dog is dissected at the midsection, trapped in three intersecting silver rings. Nearby, amorphous silver forms crusted with salt and electroplated graphite suggest a production line that leads to shiny polished silver vessels.

Between objects and canines, the dogs act as metaphorical stand-ins for us: ensnared by the gleaming lure of commodities and capital.

Mining: labour or leisure

The emphasis on metallurgy and the material of mining’s infrastructure is brought into focus in Emmaline Zanelli’s installation and two-channel video.

Second-hand rat and hamster cages are linked by a labyrinth of plastic tunnels lit with coloured LEDs. Like a nightscape, the cages lead into a film centred on teenagers in Roxby Downs, South Australia, where families service the nearby Olympic Dam mine for copper, gold and uranium.

In the video, teens appear with exotic pets in bedrooms. As a girl dances on one screen, the other cuts to a copper smelter and the camera’s swift, claustrophobic passage through plastic pipes, echoing a miner’s subterranean descent.

Placed at the centre of the exhibition and lined with gaming chairs, the work embeds the materials of mining into the social realms of labour and leisure.

Eerie corporate veneers and the business of art

The final two works move from extraction into the corporate interior.

Alexandra Peters’ installation is an expanded painting that blurs surface, sculpture and architecture. Enamel-coated industrial pipes designed to feed oil, gas or water are coiled with culturally coded shisha tubing that props a false wall over the gallery wall.

Window frames double the building’s own frames. A three-panel, screen-printed work on imitation leather hangs above dead stock grey carpet. The installation feels like the foyer of a shell company.

The effect is deadpan, summoning what cultural theorist Mark Fisher called the eerie – a sense of space emptied of its expected presence.

In Peters’ hands, this eeriness is decentering: materials and veneers leave the human adrift in the architecture of surfaces designed for occupation but hollowed of life.

The staging of corporate life inflects Keemon Williams’ adjacent installation. The work positions the artist’s Aboriginal identity as embedded within the commodities of industry.

Metal boomerangs fabricated offshore are stacked into towers that read as a cityscape or corporate graph.

On the wall, a large vinyl chart divides boom from doom; along with Williams’ portraits between those states – in one he lifts a boomerang like a phone, in another he slumps on a modernist sofa.

At the media preview, Williams quipped he doesn’t know what he’ll do with the boomerangs after the show: stripped of their use-value, they are not designed to be thrown.

Together, Peters and Williams bring the exhibition’s focus on material residues into the present tense. Industrial processes and social relations are reassembled as corporate veneers, graphs and flightless boomerangs.

From here, the show’s broader stakes become clear.

Australia in the post-industrial age

All of the artists in Primavera 2025 were born in the 1990s. While the following decades marked the global rise of internet and screen culture, more locally, this era saw the effects of Australia’s trade liberalisation.

These artists grew up during the collapse of manufacturing, leaving mining extraction and services dominant. This shift echoes in the fabricated forms and thematic concerns of the exhibition.

As Karl Marx observed in Capital, raw materials are not neutral but products of past labour, their extraction and history. That inheritance runs through the materials and objects of the exhibition: the corten steel monoliths, the silver canine traps, the mining tunnels, the oil and water pipes, the corporate foyer, the stacked boomerangs.

Each work gestures to the way materials of industry are embedded within the social and environmental aspects of Australian life.

In the show, artists play with materials as alluring yet toxic, solid yet emptied of use, all bearing the social and political conditions of their making. That reckoning finds its sharpest expression in a line from Zanelli’s video, penned by poet Autumn Royal: “I could croak with copper on my nails”.

To make art in a post-industrial age is not to escape commodities, but to reckon with their afterlife.

Primavera 2025: Young Australian Artists is at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, until March 8 2026.