Taylor Swift has been replaced as the world’s youngest female self made billionaire by a college dropout.
Lucy Guo is a self professed workaholic who has had huge success in the recent AI wave and a net worth of $1.3 billion.
The firm she co-founded with Alexandr Wang, Scale AI, has been valued at $25 billion in a deal that closed June 1. Guo started the firm when she was just 21, in 2016.
She is the daughter of Chinese immigrants and was brought up in the San Francisco Bay Area and learned coding in middle school.
After getting a $100k entrepreneaurial scholarship from billionaire investor Peter Thiel, she dropped out of Carnegie Mellon University to pursue her dream.
She then began working at Quora in 2015, where she met Wang, before working at Snapchat as their first female designer.
At Scale AI, she ran the operations and production design teams but Wang fired her after they couldn’t agree on how the business should run; “We had a difference of opinion but I am proud of what Scale AI has accomplished,” she told The Information.
Despite leaving, Guo kept her 5% stake in the business which is worth around $1.2 billion.
The firm works to train chatbots for tech giants like OpenAI and Alphabet.
She opened up about her lifestyle, admitting that she has a “a swanky apartment in Miami” as well as property in LA. She claimed she never buys groceries or cooks and orders all her food from Uber Eats: “A lot of people don’t like me because, honestly, I seem like an a–hole online. I would not like me on the internet,” she told The Post, “But I’ve made a lot of friends because I think people appreciate my savage personality.”
Now, she runs Passes, a platform labelled the family-friendly version of Patreon, with a claim they “make millionaires” by giving creators 90% of their earnings.
The company earned $40 million last year.