In 2001, Martha Stewart’s net worth was estimated at a massive $1 billion US dollars. She started making money when she was just 10 years old when she worked as an occasional babysitter. Many years later, Martha Stewart has made a career as a model, businesswoman, TV personality, and also writer.
Stewart has been involved in a lot of things in the past including book publishing and many business ventures that once placed her among the richest women in the world.
Who is Martha Stewart and How Old is She?
The businesswoman was born as Martha Helen Kostyra on August 3, 1941, in Jersey City, New Jersey, U.S. as the second of the six children of Martha Ruszkowski and Edward Kostyra. Of Polish descent, she relocated with her family to Nutley, New Jersey when she was three.
As a girl of ten, she would babysit for the children of some Major League Baseball (MLB) stars playing for New York Yankees including Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra. She got her education from Nutley High School from where she proceeded to get a degree in architectural history from Barnard College of Columbia University.
Before she came to be known for anything else, the beautiful Martha Stewart was, first of all, a model. She first got involved with modeling when she was a teenager. She then used her earnings to pay for her college education, complementing the scholarship she was on. Her modeling career saw her appearing in various magazine ads and TV commercials.
Apart from modeling, she later started as a stockbroker in 1967. At the same time, she joined her husband who started a publishing company.
Stewart learned to cook from her mother as a little girl and the same way she turned everything else into a business, she later turned her culinary skills into a business when she started a catering company in the 70s. She would also come to write more than 70 cookbooks. She began the catering business with the help of her friend, Norma Collier at the basement of her home. The business would soon grow very fast but their friendship would pay the price.
In 1990, she came up with the Martha Stewart Living magazine following a deal with Time Publishing Venture. The success of the magazine would lead to the start of the TV program also named Martha Stewart Living which ran from 1993 to 2004.
It has not always been a life on the rise for Martha Stewart. In 2004, she was tried for her involvement in the ImClone stock trading case. She was sentenced to five months in prison as well as five months of house arrest and 2 years of probation for crimes bordering on conspiracy, lying about a stock sale, and also obstruction of justice.
Husband, Daughter, And Grandchildren
When she was still in college and still modeling, Martha met a man named Andrew Stewart. He had just obtained his law degree from Yale Law School. They dated for a little while and then got married in 1961 when the then-model was 20. The marriage would sustain for close to three decades before it ended in divorce in 1990, having separated in 1987.
While still together, the two had a daughter – Alexis Stewart, who was born in 1965. Alexis now works as a media personality; she is a TV host and radio personality who is popular for her work on Sirius Satellite Radio where she hosts her show Whatever with Alexis and Jennifer.
Alexis got married in 1997 to John Robert Cuti and it lasted until 2004 when they got divorced. The Radio personality would later reveal that she was having a problem conceiving a child. However, she later gave her mother, Martha Stewart, two grandchildren whom she got through gestational surrogacy. Her first child, a daughter named Jude, was born in 2011 while her second, a son named Truman, was born in 2012.
Net Worth
There was never a point in Martha Stewart’s life where she was on the sidelines. She has always chosen to be in the field of play whether it is as a businesswoman, publisher, media person, or any other thing she decided to get involved in. This has helped her to emerge as one of the richest women in the world in 2001 when she was said to be worth $1 billion dollars.
By 2004, she was down to $330 million after her controlling stake in her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia had gone down.
Presently, her net worth has been estimated to be between $300 million US dollars. In 2011, she was said to be worth $638 million US dollars.
