A former ballerina has become the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at 29 years of age.
Luana Lopes Lara surpassed the likes of Taylor Swift to reach the milestone.
She dethroned Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI, who succeeded Swift in April.
Luana was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, before later moving to Joinville in south east of Sao Paulo.
Her mother was a maths teacher and her father, an electrical engineer.
She graduated with a degree in computer science.
Luana co-founded the prediction market company Kalshi with her MIT classmate Tarek Mansour in 2017.
Kalshi users are able to bet on the outcome of future events such as elections, pop culture happenings, and sporting fixtures, as reported by Founder Insights.
She previously told Forbes: “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.”
After considerable regulatory challenges and legal battles, the pair eventually obtained approval to operate as a designated contract market.
Since then, Kalshi’s valuation has gone through the roof.
The company went from $2 billion in June this year to $5 billion in October and now $11 billion in December, making Luana and Tarek both billionaires.
Luana has an estimated 12% stake in Kalshi, which gives her a personal net worth of around $1.3 billion, making her the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.
She won a gold medal in the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and a bronze medal in the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad, it’s reported.
Luana trained as a professional ballerina at the prestigious Bolshoi Theatre School in Joinville.
She spent nine months performing as a dancer in Austria before being accepted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US at the age of 17.
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