A 29-year-old ex-ballerina from Brazil has been named the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, leapfrogging both Taylor Swift and AI entrepreneur Lucy Guo. Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of the prediction market platform Kalshi, saw her net worth soar to $1.3 billion after her company reached an $11 billion valuation, Forbes reported. Lopes Lara, who studied ballet at Brazil’s Bolshoi Theater school, performed professionally in Austria for nine months. But she traded her dance shoes for computer science and enrolled at MIT, where she met fellow student Tarek Manour. Following internships on Wall St, they founded Kalshi in 2018 with the aim of creating a regulated marketplace for betting on event outcomes, which exploded in popularity in 2024 when users bet over $500 million on Donald Trump winning the presidential election. The company has since surged above its main competitor, Polymarket, which currently has a valuation of $9 billion. The valuation puts her ahead of 31-year-old Guo, founder of Scale AI, who held the title of youngest female billionaire since June, overtaking Swift, 35, whose net worth saw a massive boost from the popularity of her record-breaking touring.
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