She is the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, unseating Taylor Swift and Lucy Guo.
As a teenager, Luana Lopes Lara studied ballet at the Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil. Competition was cutthroat; students sometimes tried to sabotage each other by hiding glass fragments in each other’s shoes. She attended technical school in the morning, then went to ballet training from the afternoon to the night.
“Since I was very little, I wanted to do big things,” Lopes Lara said in a recent episode of the podcast Confession with Ali Partovi.
That discipline laid the foundation for Lopes Lara’s later success. Now, at 30 years old, the entrepreneur is the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, unseating pop star Taylor Swift and tech billionaire Lucy Guo in December 2025 to claim the title. Lopes Lara has a net worth of $2.6 billion, according to Forbes.
She made her fortune by co-founding Kalshi, a prediction market exchange where users can buy and sell yes-or-no contracts based on real-world future events, such as elections, economic data, weather and sports. Lopes Lara is working towards a future where people can essentially bet on anything.
Kalshi is “the first federally regulated exchange in the United States dedicated exclusively to trading on the outcomes of future events,” according to its site.
Lopes Lara said on the podcast that many smart founders fall into a common trap when it comes to starting their own business: They become “obsessed with probabilities.”
Source link







