A 29-year-old former Brazilian ballerina unseated Taylor Swift and AI tech entrepreneur Lucy Guo to become the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.
Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of prediction market firm Kalshi, snatched the crown from 31-year-old Scale AI co-founder Guo after the platform hit an $11 billion evaluation and her net worth skyrocketed to $1.3 billion, Forbes announced Tuesday.
Guo held the title of world’s youngest self-made female billionaire since June, when the AI company she co-founded as a 21-year-old put her net worth at $1.3 billion, overtaking Swift, whose popularity from her 2023 Eras tour boosted her past Kylie Jenner.
Lopes Lara, a Brazilian native, attended the famed Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil to study ballet before she graduated and moved to Austria to pursue a career as a professional ballerina.
She stayed in Europe for nine months before trading in her pointe shoes for her thinking cap at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she studied computer science and met fellow student Tarek Mansour.
Lopes Lara and Mansour — who both also worked at hedge fund Citadel — co-founded Kalshi in 2018. In six years, their firm raised $1 billion to achieve a valuation of over $11 billion.
The two received internships at Five Rings Capital in New York City in 2018, where they hung out at night and came up with the idea for a prediction market business.
During their time in Manhattan, the two found many financial decisions were driven by predictions about future events, but there was no “straightforward way” to directly trade on event outcomes, according to Kalshi’s website.
Lopes Lara and Mansour spent the COVID pandemic building the company, fighting for federal regulation approval and getting investment from significant companies, including Charles Schwab and Sequoia Capital.
“Right out of college, we were taking on an insane amount of risk. It was two years without a single product — nothing launched — and if we didn’t get regulated, the company would just go to zero,” Lopes Lara said.
In November 2020, Kalshi received approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and was listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2022.
The company won a lawsuit ahead of the 2024 US presidential election and became the first company to offer legal election contracts.
“We really wanted to do things the right way because our vision was to build the biggest financial exchange in the world,” Lopes Lara said. “Doing it legally was something we couldn’t compromise on.”
Users bet over $500 million and correctly predicted President Donald Trump would defeat Vice President Kamala Harris in the election.
“It’s actually the best mechanism to get more truth about who’s actually going to win,” Mansour told The Post’s NYNext ahead of the election. “We’re letting the market speak instead of pundits, pollsters, people, political figures, people with biases or conflicts of interest, people that had incentives or not.”
Kalshi bills itself as “the world’s largest global prediction market company.”
The two 29-year-olds each own an estimated 12 percent of the company — pegging their net worths at $1.3 billion each.
Kalshi ranks above its main competitor, Polymarket, which has a valuation of $9 billion, according to Forbes.
CNN recently inked a deal with Kalshi that will inject real-time prediction market probabilities into the network’s coverage across TV, digital and streaming.
CNN will display the data through a real-time ticker on air and allow anchors and correspondents to reference Kalshi probabilities across its platforms when discussing political, cultural, news and weather forecasts, according to Axios.
The company is seeking to become the “most authoritative source of information about the real-time probabilities of major cultural and political future events,” Mansour said.
The 35-year-old “Life of a Showgirl” pop star is currently worth $1.6 billion, ahead of Guo’s $1.25 billion. Jenner lost her billionaire status after Forbes claimed her company, Kylie Cosmetics, inflated its income to spark the billion-dollar valuation, Axios reported.
Jenner, 28, is currently estimated to be worth $670 million.
