There is a lot of money to be made in beauty, and right now a lot of it is being made by m ale executives. Moj Mahdara wants to change that. The C.E.O. of Beautycon, which holds semiannual festival-like trade shows, recently raised $20 million in funding and has begun to open pop-up retail spaces in Los Angeles. She wants to see women achieve Warren Buffett-, Bill Gates- and Jeff Bezos-level wealth on their own terms.

So she brought in a case study: Cardi B, the queen of “money moves.”

Cardi talks about money without condescension. “Everything she’s telling you — about spending, saving, taxes — is transparent and through her lived experience,” said Ms. Mahdara. At Beautycon NYC, Cardi and Ms. Mahdara spoke about how the basics of financial literacy ignore some personal-finance realities. “You can save money when you can afford to save money,” Cardi said. “How you gonna save money and you have bills to pay?”

Ms. Mahdara shared a common statistic on pay parity: A woman makes around 80 cents on a man’s dollar ( a recent study found the gap is worse than that, 49 cents to every dollar). She asked Cardi for her insight on the matter. The rapper insisted she gets paid equally — now, at least. Back when Cardi was Insta-famous, but not yet “Bodak Yellow” famous, she hosted parties at clubs for a fee. It became clear that the rappers and other guys she co-hosted with were making more money than she was for the same job. “I said, ‘I’m going to stop taking bookings until y’all pay me more,’” she said. And “that bag doubled.”