A former ballerina has officially leap-frogged Kylie Jenner and Taylor Swift to become the world’s youngest self-made billionaire — and she’s only 29.
Brazilian-born Luana Lopes Lara has been crowned by Forbes as the youngest woman on Earth to verifiably earn a billion dollars entirely on her own. She takes the title from Scale AI’s Lucy Guo, who had previously bumped Swift from the spot earlier this year
Lara’s meteoric rise comes from Kalshi, her fast-growing prediction-market startup now valued at a staggering $11 billion. With an estimated 12% stake, her personal fortune has hit roughly $1.3 billion.
Kalshi is a federally regulated exchange where users trade on the outcomes of real-world events — from elections to celebrity scandals to sports.
But Lara’s path to billionaire status started far from Silicon Valley. As a young ballerina training at the brutal Bolshoi Theatre School in Joinville, Brazil, she endured extreme discipline — including teachers allegedly pressing lit cigarettes under her thigh to test her pain tolerance. She described those school years as “the most intense of her life.”
Still, she excelled academically, winning national medals in astronomy and mathematics before spending nine months performing professionally in Austria.
At 17, she traded pointe shoes for algorithms, moving alone to the U.S. to study computer science at MIT.
In 2017, Lara co-founded Kalshi with fellow MIT student Tarek Mansour, who also hit millionaire status by 29. The early years were brutal — as Lara recalls, they spent two years with “zero product launched,” taking what she called an “insane” risk as they waited for federal regulators to approve their big idea.
More than 40 law firms refused to represent them, calling the duo too young. Only former CFTC insider Jeff Bandman eventually took the leap.
Kalshi finally secured federal approval in 2020 — while competitor Polymarket was hit with a $1.4 million fine for operating unregulated markets.
Then came the defining showdown of 2023: when the CFTC tried to block Kalshi’s election markets, Lara led a bold lawsuit against the agency, even as investors begged her to surrender. She didn’t — and in September 2024, a judge ruled in Kalshi’s favor. The platform went on to host over $500 million in bets on the 2024 presidential race, which its users correctly predicted would end in a Trump victory.
“A ballerina is trained to hear ‘no’ and push through it,” said a16z partner Alex Immerman. “There are few better backgrounds for a founder.”
Since the ruling, Kalshi’s growth has gone wild. Trading volume has exploded 1,000%, topping $1 billion in weekly trades. It has integrated with Robinhood, Webull, StockX, Google Finance — even the NHL. Donald Trump Jr. joined its advisory board in January. The platform has also expanded into crypto with markets on Solana.
Despite fresh battles with state regulators over sports markets, investors are more bullish than ever. Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel said, “I don’t know that we have funded a company with as much potential impact as this one.”
Not bad for a ballerina who walked away from the stage — and danced her way into billionaire history.
