The Harry Potter books transformed her from a single mother on welfare to an author with a ten-figure fortune—but her massive charity initiatives dropped her from the ranks of billionaires. Now, thanks to new Potterverse books, movies, a play, and several theme parks—and despite a divisive social-media presence—she is magically back in the three-comma club.

The Dark Arts of Cancel Culture have been no match for the magic of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. If there was any price to be paid for placing herself at the center of the debate over transgender rights, you wouldn’t know it by looking at her pugnacious feed on X (formerly Twitter). There, Rowling posts several times a day in support of gender fundamentalism to her 14 million-plus followers, frequently trading barbs with commenters—even fracturing her relationship with Potter stars Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint—while toasting her own personal successes.

“I love it when a plan comes together,” she wrote in mid-April, channeling The A-Team’s Hannibal Smith, after the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex. The accompanying photo showed Rowling holding a cocktail and smoking a cigar aboard her superyacht, which is valued at $150 million.

Bruising culture war aside, the 59-year-old’s Rowling’s business empire is now larger than ever. In the four years since she began posting about transgender rights in 2020, Forbes estimates Rowling has earned more than $80 million per year from the sales of her books and the vast litany of Potterverse brand extensions, including movies, TV shows, theme parks, video games, theater and merchandise. Even after factoring in high U.K. taxes and her extensive charity ventures, she has comfortably rejoined the billionaire ranks with a net worth of $1.2 billion, according to Forbes estimates.

Rowling was previously a fixture on the Forbes billionaires list from 2004-2011—the height of Pottermania—until new reporting in 2012 uncovered $160 million in philanthropic giving. In the years since, she’s built back her 10-figure fortune through multimillion-dollar revenue streams across every conceivable medium.

And her momentum is not slowing any time soon, with a new HBO Max series adaptation of the Harry Potter books going into production this summer, expected to run for a decade beginning in late 2026 and mint a whole new generation of fans. Forbes estimates that Rowling could earn about $20 million per year for her involvement in the new series—one part of a wide-ranging deal with Warner Bros.—and she was “very, very involved in the process selecting the writer and the director,” said HBO Max CEO Casey Bloys in November. One has to imagine she had the same input in casting the new pre-teen Harry, Hermoine and Ron, announced on Monday. When asked about Rowling’s politics on an episode of The Town with Matt Belloni in April, Bloys said, “She’s entitled to those views. And if you want to debate her, you can go on Twitter.”

In the nearly three decades since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone debuted in 1997, Rowling has shrewdly expanded the Potterverse, building it into a franchise that is likely to run as long as Harry’s fictional British compatriots Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. According to Habo Studio, a consulting firm that ranks the strongest intellectual property brands in the U.S. by surveying thousands of consumers, Harry Potter is the sixth strongest brand in all of entertainment, and No. 1 among millennials.