Bethenny Frankel says she is more than willing to retire — under the right circumstances.
“I would definitely retire — like, if I end up with some billionaire on some big boat,” Frankel, 54, told Ad Week in an interview published on Tuesday, May 14.
The former Real Housewives of New York City star didn’t dwell on thoughts of retreating to a private life on board a yacht for long, since she admittedly couldn’t resist documenting her sea-faring life on social media.
“I would end up doing social media on the boat,” she conceded.
Frankel has inarguably had huge success in the business world, as she built her Skinnygirl margarita into a lifestyle brand that she sold to Beam Global (now known as Suntory Global Spirits) in 2011 for a reported $120 million.
Since that time, Frankel has dabbled in property flipping with her friend, Million Dollar Listing New York star Fredrik Eklund, and become a hugely successful influencer with more than 3.8 million Instagram followers and 2.8 million fans on TikTok.
The RHONY alum credited her success as an influencer with being “honest” and “authentic” because “the world got so sick of filtered B.S.”
“I see a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners that can’t help but want to promote themselves,” she argued. “But not everybody can do it, and you have to really know if you can. It has to land.”
Frankel said she’d learned early in the development of her social media presence that it was important to never “kiss the ass of brands” who had no interest in working with her.
“[These] brands don’t notice [influencers or] care about them. They don’t want you … [It’s like] you’re in the cafeteria trying to get the cool girl to be your friend,” she insisted.
Earlier this month, Frankel announced that she’d moved with 14-year-old daughter Bryn from New York to Florida due to “a series of events” in her personal life. The reality TV icon subsequently shared on her “Just B” podcast that Bryn was the primary catalyst for her move.
“We were down in Florida and something very personal transpired, and I went to school in Florida,” Frankel recalled “I don’t want to get into all the details of this now, but something happened, and my daughter, who had said years ago, ‘I want to move to Florida,’ she cried to me.”
She went on, “I’m like, ‘We can’t. There are a set of circumstances, and we can’t. … At that time, it was just a concept, and I couldn’t have imagined living in Florida. So, she said, ‘I want to move to Florida this trip,’ and I was, like, ‘Something had happened.”
Frankel admitted she always planned to settle down in Florida anyway once Bryn went off to college, so she ultimately agreed to uproot her life a little earlier than planned.
“[Bryn] meant it, and she begged me. She didn’t have to beg me, like, she was like, ‘I really want this.’ I know my kid and I knew that once this was presented … that she’d want to move. I was just like, ‘F***ing f*** it, OK,’” she remembered.
Last week, the legendary RHONY star acknowledged on TikTok that she hadn’t been “totally honest” with fans about her reasons for moving. Frankel explained that she was open to Bryn’s suggestion of moving because she’d become more of an introvert due to her mother Bernadette Birk’s death at age 74 from lung cancer in April 2024.
“I don’t want to just rot at home and feel like I’m wasting, like, years of my life,” she said. “All I’ve done in the last five or six years is reflect. I’ve done my reflecting. I’ve done my therapy. My mom died. I had, you know, a lot going on, and I’m ready to live.”
Frankel continues to frequently comment on the Bravosphere, including calling a rumored shakeup on RHONY “the end of an era” last week. While there were initial reports that RHONY was being put on pause, a Bravo spokesperson later told Us Weekly that was not the case.
“Nothing is official,” a network spokesperson told Us. “The show hasn’t been canceled.”
