Olivia Benson

Olivia Benson is a Scottish Fold cat owned by Taylor Swift, and one of the most commercially successful pets on the planet. Born in January 2014 and named after Mariska Hargitay's detective on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, she joined Swift's older cat, Meredith Grey, and quickly became a public figure in her own right.

Where most celebrity cats are famous simply for being owned by someone famous, Olivia built an actual CV. In October 2014 she fronted the Keds 'Sneaky Cat' shoe campaign and appeared in a Diet Coke commercial, and she has since turned up in outtakes and spots for AT&T and DirecTV. She is a recurring face in Swift's music videos — 'Blank Space' (2014), 'Me!' (2019) and 'Karma' (2023) — and appeared in the 2020 documentary Miss Americana. Her profile is high enough that she serves as the logo for Taylor Swift Productions, making her quite literally the brand mascot of a pop empire.

That ad-and-merchandise income has earned Olivia a regular place near the top of 'world's wealthiest cats' lists, usually alongside Choupette and the record-breaking Blackie. Behind the glamour she is a reminder of a more sober fact about her breed: like all Scottish Folds, Olivia carries osteochondrodysplasia, the cartilage-and-bone condition that gives the breed its folded ears but also affects the joints — a point her fame has helped bring to wider attention.