Passes founder dethrones Taylor Swift as youngest self-made woman billionaire

Passes founder and Scale AI co-founder, Lucy Guo, has surpassed music artist Taylor Swift as the world's youngest self-made billionaire, according to Forbes

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Forbes has revealed the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire is American entrepreneur and AI company co-founder, Lucy Guo, 30. Her current net worth is $1.3billion (£958million).

The publication released their 10th Anniversary list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women, highlighting previous title holders including Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, Sheryl Sandberg and Kim Kardashian.

Guo knocks Swift off the top spot, as the two-time founder made her wealth through entrepreneurial endeavours in artificial intelligence and creator monetization. Guo was a co-founder of artificial intelligence company, Scale AI, which was valued at USD$14billion in a funding round in 2024.

While Guo left the company in 2018, a potential tender offer has revalued the company at USD$25 billion, which has propelled Guo’s net worth to over $1billion thanks to her retained stake in the company of just under 5%.

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Commenting on her new self-made billionaire title, Guo shared with the Los Angeles Business Journal: “To be very frank, I think there are people that are self-made where their parents really gave them nothing. I’m not as self-made as someone that grew up in the hood, but society defines self-made as just, you didn’t get it from a trust fund. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t have support.”

Guo co-founded Scale AI with Alexandr Wang when she was 21, two years after dropping out of Carnegie Mellon University as a computer science student. Guo has said she knew her parents would be disappointed with her decision to drop out of the prestigious institution, but it was stirred by a once-in-a-life-time offer.

Guo left school in her senior year after winning the highly coveted Thiel Fellowship, which awards young people a grant of $100,000 (raised to $200,000 since Guo’s time) to pursue their original ideas. The Thiel Fellowship is notorious for its main condition that recipients need to drop out of school, targeting those who “want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.”

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Guo left Scale AI in 2018 for reasons that remain hazy though she attributed her exit to “differences in product vision and road map”. Guo has not commented on whether she would sell her stake in Scale AI as part of the potential new deal.

While she’s pursued a few projects post-Scale, Guo’s main focus these days is Passes, the creator platform she founded in 2022.

Passes was designed to allow all types of content creators to manage subscriptions, offer exclusive services, and engage with their communities more directly. Guo told the LA Business Journal: “I wanted to create a platform where creators can really monetize their brand in the ways that it makes sense for them.”

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