29-year-old becomes youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world
A former ballerina performed an incredible career pirouette and has now become the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world.
It's a title which has been held by the likes of Kylie Jenner (controversially) and Taylor Swift - but Luana Lopes Lara is the latest girlboss to claim the crown.
The Brazilian-born businesswoman, 29, is one of the brains behind the capital market company Kalshi - which has now been valued at a tidy $11billion, according to Forbes.
She started the prediction market firm in 2018 alongside Tarek Mansour, also 29, whom she met while studying at the very respectable Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
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Lara reportedly owns a 12 per cent stake in Kalshi - meaning she boasts a net worth of about $1.3 billion.
It is believed that Mansour owns a similar slice of the business, which allows users to bet on the outcome of various events such as sports fixtures, elections and developments in pop culture.
"We saw that most trading happens when people have some view about the future, and then try to find a way to put that in the markets," Lara said.
"We really wanted to do things the right way because our vision was to build the biggest financial exchange in the world."
Fresh out of college, the pair took on an 'insane amount of risk', according to the billionaire - but thankfully, it's paid off tenfold now.
"It was two years without a single product - nothing launched - and if we didn't get regulated, the company would just go to zero," she previously told Forbes.
Lara and Mansour managed to get the ball rolling properly in November 2020 after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) granted them approval to operate as a designated contract market (DCM).
And Kalshi has continued to go from strength to strength ever since, despite a few run-ins with financial watchdogs in the US.
Back in June this year, the business was valued at $2billion, before it climbed to $5billion in October - and now, it's worth a whopping $11billion.
Lara's past is just as impressive as her present, too - as the 29-year-old trained at the renowned Bolshoi School of Ballet in Joinville, Brazil, for a decade, seeing her practice a tiresome ten hours a day to perfect her craft.
And despite the pressures she now faces running a multi-billion dollar business, she still says that high school gave her the 'most intense years of her life'.
Despite her dedication to ballet dancing, the daughter of a maths teacher and electrical engineer always dreamt of pursuing a more academic endeavour.
And thank god she did - as she's now earned the title of the youngest self-made female billionaire on the planet.
Lara has snatched the crown from tech tycoon Lucy Guo, who's only had the bragging rights since April.
Guo, 31, is the co-founder of Scale AI, a California-based data annotation company which provides labelled data used to train artificial intelligence applications.
Although she eventually left the firm in 2018 after falling out with her business partner Alexandr Wang, she kept hold of her three per cent stake in it.
Due to a deal which was struck earlier this year, the size of her fortune skyrocketed. Now, Guo is worth about $1.3billion, according to Forbes.
Good for you, girlies.
Topics: Money, Celebrity Net Worth, World News, Business, Technology
Olivia Burke