Lucy Guo, world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, surpassing Taylor Swift. Photos: X.
Meet Lucy Guo: Taylor Swift has long held the distinction of being the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, reaching the milestone in 2023 at age 33. But the pop icon was recently unseated, not by another entertainer, but by a 30-year-old tech founder who describes herself as a workaholic with a party-driven lifestyle.
Lucy Guo, a college dropout who has benefited from the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.
Guo clinched the title in April after it emerged that Scale AI, the company she co-founded in 2016 with Alexandr Wang, had been valued at $25 billion in a deal. Guo was 21 at the time of the company’s founding, while Wang was 19.
Born to Chinese immigrants and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Guo began coding in middle school. She later dropped out of Carnegie Mellon University after receiving a $100,000 entrepreneurial scholarship funded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel.
Guo worked at Quora in 2015, where she met Wang, and went on to join Snapchat briefly as the company’s first female designer.
At Scale AI, Guo led operations and production design. However, she was reportedly fired by Wang after disagreements over the company’s direction.
“We had a difference of opinion but I am proud of what Scale AI has accomplished,” Guo told The Information last year.
Despite her exit, she retained most of her 5% stake, now worth approximately $1.2 billion, according to Forbes. Scale AI provides data labeling services used by major technology firms like OpenAI and Alphabet to train AI models.
Guo is known for what she openly describes as an intense work ethic paired with a hard-partying routine. She owns “a swanky apartment in Miami” and a home in Los Angeles, and says she never cooks or buys groceries, relying entirely on Uber Eats.
She claims to work at least eight hours a day even while on vacation, frequently attends techno raves, and once boasted about taking two Barry’s Bootcamp classes daily.
After leaving Scale AI, Guo launched Passes, a content creation platform marketed as a family-friendly alternative to OnlyFans and Patreon. The platform allows creators to keep 90% of their earnings and raised $40 million in a Series A round last year, according to Fortune.
However, Passes is now embroiled in a class-action lawsuit filed in February, accusing the company of enabling child pornography.
The complaint alleges that Alec Celestin, the plaintiff’s agent, and Lani Ginoza, Passes’ director of talent, knowingly allowed sexually explicit content featuring OnlyFans model Alice Rosenblum, who was underage at the time, to circulate on the platform. Passes says Ginoza was not employed by the company during the period in question.
In addition to Scale AI and Passes, Guo also founded a small investment firm, Backend Capital. She now holds a net worth of $1.3 billion, according to Forbes’ latest list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women.
She appears at No. 26 on Forbes’ 2024 list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women. Swift ranks higher at No. 21.
Despite losing the “youngest” title, Swift remains the world’s richest female musician, with a net worth of $1.6 billion.
Zubair Amin is a Senior Journalist at NewsX with over seven years of experience in reporting and editorial work. He has written for leading national and international publications, including Foreign Policy Magazine, Al Jazeera, The Economic Times, The Indian Express, The Wire, Article 14, Mongabay, News9, among others. His primary focus is on international affairs, with a strong interest in US politics and policy. He also writes on West Asia, Indian polity, and constitutional issues. Zubair tweets at zubaiyr.amin
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