Kalshi Co-Founder Becomes Youngest Self-Made Female Billionaire at 29
Youngest self-made female billionaire: A 29-year-old former Brazilian ballerina has become the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire dethroning Taylor Swift and tech entrepreneur Lucy Guo after her company Kalshi reached an $11 billion valuation, Forbes announced Tuesday.
Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of the prediction-market platform Kalshi, now holds a net worth of $1.3 billion, surpassing 31-year-old Guo, who previously topped the list after Scale AI’s valuation jump earlier this year. Swift, whose record-breaking 2023 Eras Tour pushed her past Kylie Jenner, has now been pushed further down the rankings.
Lopes Lara’s path to billionaire status is nothing short of extraordinary. Born in Brazil, she trained at the prestigious Bolshoi Theater School before moving to Austria to pursue a professional ballet career. But after nine months in Europe, she shifted gears entirely, enrolling at MIT to study computer science. There, she met fellow student and future co-founder Tarek Mansour.
The pair later worked at Citadel and Citadel Securities before co-founding Kalshi in 2018. The idea emerged during internships at Five Rings Capital in New York City, where they realized that nearly all financial decisions hinged on predictions yet no platform allowed people to trade directly on future events. Kalshi set out to fill that gap.
Their journey was risky. For two years during the pandemic, they had no product and were fighting for federal approval. “If we didn’t get regulated, the company would just go to zero,” Lopes Lara said. In 2020, Kalshi secured approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), becoming the first regulated marketplace in the U.S. for event-based contracts.
Kalshi gained national attention ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election when it won a major lawsuit and became the first company to offer legal election contracts. Users wagered more than $500 million, ultimately predicting Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris.
Today, Kalshi calls itself the world’s largest global prediction market, ranking ahead of rival Polymarket, valued at $9 billion. Both founders, now 29, each hold roughly 12% of the company, securing their billionaire status.
The company’s influence continues to expand. CNN recently signed a deal to integrate Kalshi’s real-time prediction probabilities into its TV broadcasts, digital platforms and streaming services — a move expected to revolutionize how Americans consume political and cultural forecasts.
Meanwhile, Swift remains worth an estimated $1.6 billion, while Guo’s net worth sits at $1.25 billion. Kylie Jenner, once declared the youngest self-made billionaire, is valued around $670 million after Forbes challenged her cosmetic brand’s financial claims.
Kalshi’s rise signals a new era in which prediction markets — once considered fringe — are becoming mainstream financial and media tools, backed by billion-dollar valuations and major corporate partnerships.
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