Dana Thomas, Bloomberg News
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Gwyneth Paltrow was the platonic ideal of the It Girl and Hollywood nepo-baby, dating Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck and winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Shakespeare in Love. Then, in 2008, Paltrow engineered a career detour nobody quite saw coming: She launched a website and free weekly newsletter recommending her favorite restaurants, travel destinations, luxury hotels, fashion boutiques and day spas — a Gwyneth Hot List, you could say.
Thus was the birth of Goop, a trailblazing platform in wellness, style and beauty that in less than a decade grew into a sprawling media and e-commerce enterprise. It has, at various times, sold clothing, beauty products, vibrators, homeware (including a headline-maki