Taylor Swift has built an empire on breakup ballads and sequined revenge, but there’s a new queen in the billionaire sandbox, and she didn’t need a Grammy to get there — just an iron gut for startups and a taste for algorithmic chaos.
Meet Lucy Guo, 30. College dropout, tech renegade, and now the youngest self-made female billionaire on the planet, according to Forbes. Swift, 35, has been booted from the throne — gracefully, sure, but make no mistake, this is a regime change.
Guo isn’t just another Silicon Valley ghost in a hoodie. She’s the co-founder of Scale AI, the behind-the-scenes giant you probably haven’t heard of unless you’ve tried to train a machine to think like a human. She started the company in 2016 with Alexandr Wang, who was somehow even younger than she was — the kind of absurd genius pairing that would’ve been mythologized if they’d been writing love songs instead of Python.
But the love didn’t last. By 2018, Wang allegedly booted Guo from the company over creative differences, a tale as old as startups. But she walked with a souvenir: a 5% stake in the company she helped build — and in tech, that kind of alimony turns into solid gold when your ex’s valuation hits $25 billion.
That’s where we are now. Scale AI is wrapping up a tender offer — Wall Street lingo for “early employees cashing out before the IPO fireworks.” Guo’s share is reportedly worth around $1.2 billion. Add in the earnings from Passes, her OnlyFans rival startup — because why not pivot from enterprise AI to sex tech — and she’s sitting pretty at $1.25 billion.
Swift, to her credit, still holds court at $1.6 billion, all earned from music. The woman minted a billion from guitar strings and ticket stubs. But Guo did it with code and capital — and a lot less applause.
It’s a strange new sorority: Six self-made female billionaires under 40. Rihanna is in the mix too, floating somewhere between Fenty gloss and global domination. But Guo’s ascent is different. She’s not performing. She’s not serenading. She’s not smiling for the camera. She’s building, selling, flipping, founding, and staying dangerously off-script.
No tours. No encore. Just the sweet, sterile hum of servers and the silence of a bank account fattening in the dark.
Lucy Guo didn’t shake anything off — she just scaled up.
Last modified: April 24, 2025
