Business owners are by no means strangers to inflating figures — but according to a pair of new exposés, one girlboss took her tall tales to new heights.

Entrepreneur Daniella Pierson was, as she explains in her oft-repeated career lore, a precocious 19-years-old when she founded The Newsette, a daily pop culture and style newsletter that landed her on Forbes' "30 Under 30" list in 2020.

Today, Pierson counts designer Diane von Furstenberg as a friend and business partner, owns a nine-million-dollar condo in Manhattan's ritzy SoHo neighborhood, and boasts more than a million subscribers to Newsette Media Group's (NMG) three newsletters. But according to dueling investigations from Business Insider and — ironically, given its plaudits of her accomplishments a few years back — Forbes itself, this self-styled newsletter queen appears, in some key cases, to have fibbed her way to the top.

As both outlets found based on interviews with former employees and reviews of internal documents, the 30-year-old media maven's empire is based on several major embellishments ranging from how much her company is really worth to the number of subscribers her newsletters — The Newsette, the Weekly Wrap fashion periodical, and the Sunday-only All Access Pass — actually have on the books.

Among her greatest alleged exaggerations — of which there are several listed throughout both stories, which were published just a day apart and, curiously, without any mention of the other — is her insistent claim that Newsette Media Group is worth $200 million.

At some point in either 2021 or 2022, Forbes reports, RXBar founder Peter Rahal did indeed invest an undisclosed sum of money into Pierson's newsletter company that brought its value up to $200 million. In the years since, however, Newsette has hemorrhoraged the majority of that value. After looking through financial documents obtained by Forbes, media valuation expert Kevin Kamen estimated that the company is now worth "no more than $12.2 million" — and that's if it's worth that much at all.

Conflating and exaggerating numbers seems, per these two investigations, to be a thing for Pierson. Over the years, the Newsette owner has repeatedly bragged about her newsletters' high subscriber count, claiming initially that her flagship property had 500,000 people subscribed to it to, and more recently boasting about a whopping 1.3 million subscribers.

But the internal documents leaked to both investigative outlets found that those subscriber numbers weren't even in the ballpark of the real figures. When Pierson was claiming that she had more than 500,000 subscribers, documents show that the real figure was just over 400,000.

Today, as BI found, Newsette's properties are actually up to the 500,000-subscriber mark — but the company claimed as recently as this year in a pitch deck that it has "1.3 million+" A spokesperson for Pierson told that website that the company's email list has about 1.2 million people on it — a figure that includes those who opted out of receiving the newsletters in their inboxes, which doesn't sound like something to brag about.

Behind the scenes of Pierson's flashy and apparently-exaggerated facade, her investments — and Newsette itself — have allegedly been falling apart. In 2021, for instance, she cofounded a mental health startup called Wondermind with Selena Gomez and the actress' mother. By January 2023, Forbes reports based on retellings from four former staffers, Pierson was pushed out when she clashed with her celebrity cofounder — though naturally, her spokesperson insisted that she "would not characterize it" as such.

With many, many more details shared in these two tea-spilling articles from Business Insider and Forbes, it's worth reading both to get even more tea. (Her outright denial of all these well-reported details, which was posted to Instagram just before both articles were published, is worth a read as well.)

That said, one quote from an ex-employee really stood out.

"I don’t know that she actually cares about building a successful business as much as she cares about being able to say she’s a badass CEO," one of Pierson's former employees, who asked that their name be withheld to avoid retaliation, told Forbes. "It’s all smoke and mirrors."

More on crumbling empires: The Tesla Diner Is Already Falling Apart Under Mismanagement


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