Who is Lucy Guo? The thirty -year -old who overcame Taylor Swift as the youngest billionaire in the world | The interest

Lucy Guo is a thirty -year -old woman from San Francisco, United States, daughter of Chinese immigrants, who left university studies, co -founded an artificial intelligence company and, according to Forbes, recently became the youngest multimillion -dollar woman in the world with a fortune made by itself, removing such a position to the iconic Taylor Swift.

It should be remembered that the 35 -year -old American artist held the throne of the world’s most millionaire young people by their own means since the end of 2023, with a fortune from her musical career and exceeds 1,000 million dollars.

In addition, he had recently managed to fully appropriate his first 6 studio albums, after a legal dispute that lasted almost 6 years with Big Machine Records and his owner Scooter Braun.

However, on Wednesday, June 4, Forbes published its annual list of rich, young women and with their own fortunes, with the new thirty tenant, Lucy Guo, in the first position.

Lucy Guo’s story

Lucy Guo was born in 1994 and grew in the area of ​​San Francisco Bay, California, in a family of Chinese immigrants, who worked in the world of electrical engineering.

That environment caused Guo to be interested from a young age in technology, especially in the writing of code and everything concerning programming, putting himself as a goalkeeper, although his parents did not support her at all. Also, he showed his entrepreneurial attitudes.

«I grew up as a girl who was not popular and with parents who did not believe at all in me. They told me that I could not be an engineer, among other things. On the other hand, I was very enterprising since childhood. They sent me to the director’s office for trying to make money selling letters of pokémon or colored pencils at school, ”Guo said in the Business of Feelings podcast, in 2022.

He began programming when he was in high school, demonstrating that he had an innate talent for such trade. Upon fulfilling the age of majority, he prepared to pursue his dream, enrolling to study computer science at the Carnegie Mellon University.

However, he left the race in 2014, when he benefited from about $ 100,000 for the Thiel scholarship. A program funded by the investor Peter Thiel, for young students willing to leave the classrooms to devote themselves to entrepreneurship.

Then, she was a fellow on Facebook, she worked as a product designer in Snapcat and later in Quora, until she met Alexandr Wang, the software engineer she founded in 2016 the company Scale AI, when he was just 19 years old and she 21.

Initially, Wang assumed the role of company director and Lucy Guo worked in his specialty: product design. However, the harmonious relationship did not last long.

In less than a year, differences between the two emerged, so Guo left his post in the company, but intelligently retained a good part of his actions and these are the ones that have allowed him to knead most of his current fortune.

Why is Scale ai giving so much money?

Scale AI makes, in Wang’s words, the work of peak and blade for artificial intelligence: they label the necessary data to train applications and models of AI and improve its operation.

But at that time the AI ​​was just beginning to take off and although Scale had a good economic performance, this was not even close to that today in any successful company.

Until the rise of artificial intelligence catapulted them towards resounding success. They got clients such as the United States government, OpenAI for Chatgpt, Alphabet and other large companies.

The cherry of the cake was the “explosion” that lived last May, due to a public process of bidding and repurchase of shares, in which the company’s first employees and investors could sell their participation in it.

According to Business Insider, this process revalued the company up to about 25,000 million dollars, which meant an 80% increase with respect to the value it had in May 2024 (13.8 billion dollars).

This resounding change in the value of Scale AI is the one that pushed Lucy Guo to be the most millionaire young woman in the world, because although she no longer works in the company, she maintained 5% of the shares, which added to her other ventures, leads her to have a fortune of around 1.3 billion dollars according to Forbes.

In addition, Guo stands as one of the only six multimillion -dollar women made to themselves under 40 years around the world, with the aggregate of having arrived there after leaving the university and the company itself that has given millions.

Other ventures

After his departure from Scale AI, Lucy Guo remained driven by his passion for technological startups and founded a small risk capital firm called Backend Capital, to invest in companies in his initiation stage.

Then, in 2022 he founded Passes, a platform that works in a similar way to Onlyfans and Patreon, allowing a direct connection of celebrities and content creators with their followers, but letting these stay with most of their profits and aspiring to be a more familiar version than the aforementioned platforms.

In his effort to position Passes, Guo signed contracts with celebrities such as the Gymnast Olivia Dunne, the legend of the basketball Shaquille O’Neal and DJ Kygo, to connect with their fans through this platform.

In addition, it has managed to lift financing rounds of up to 40 million dollars, so that the company currently reaches a value of 150 million, consolidates and contributions with Scale AI to its growing fortune.