30-year-old Lucy Guo usurps Taylor Swift as youngest self-made female billionaire
A 30-year-old hard-partying, college dropout has dethroned Taylor Swift for an impressive record anyone would love to hold.
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Taylor Swift has been dethroned as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, according to Forbes — by a 30-year-old, hard-partying college dropout who has reaped a windfall from the artificial intelligence boom.
Lucy Guo — a self-professed workaholic who rides an electric skateboard to work when she’s not being chauffeured by an assistant — has a net worth of $1.3 billion, according to Forbes’ list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women released Wednesday.
Guo took Swift’s title of world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire in April, when it was reported that Scale AI — the firm she co-founded with Alexandr Wang in 2016 when she was just 21 and he was 19 — had been valued at $25 billion in a deal set to close by June 1.
The tender offer has not been finalised yet, but it is expected to close at that valuation in a few weeks, a source familiar with the matter told The Post.
The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Guo was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she quickly picked up coding in middle school. She dropped out of Carnegie Mellon University as she clinched a $100,000 entrepreneurial scholarship bankrolled by billionaire investor Peter Thiel.
She took a job in 2015 at Quora, where she met Wang, and later worked at Snapchat for a brief period as the company’s first female designer.
At Scale AI, Guo ran the operations and production design teams — until Wang, who took the chief executive position, reportedly fired her after the two sparred over how the company should be run.
“We had a difference of opinion but I am proud of what Scale AI has accomplished,” Guo told the tech news site the Information last year.
Still, Guo kept most of her 5 per cent stake in Scale AI, which is worth approximately $1.2 billion, according to Forbes. The firm labels data used by tech giants like OpenAI and Alphabet to train their chatbots.
With “a swanky apartment in Miami” and a house in Los Angeles, Guo has admitted she never buys groceries or cooks, instead ordering all her meals from Uber Eats.
She says she works at least eight hours a day when on vacation and has boasted about taking two Barry’s bootcamp fitness classes a day. She frequently attends techno raves.
“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 in 2022. “But I’ve made a lot of friends because I think people appreciate my savage personality.”
The Post previously reported on her massive collection of Pokemon paraphernalia — including slippers, stuffed animals, artwork and a Swarovski crystal necklace.
She now runs Passes, a content creation platform that has been dubbed the family-friendly version of OnlyFans, and Patreon, claiming to “make millionaires” by allowing creators to hold onto 90 per cent of their earnings.
Passes reaped $40 million last year in a Series A funding round, according to Fortune — allowing Guo to fund her lavish party-girl lifestyle.
But now Passes and Guo are facing allegations, in a class-action suit filed in February, that the platform allowed child pornography.
The bombshell suit accuses Alec Celestin, the plaintiff’s agent, and Lani Ginoza, the site’s director of talent, of knowingly allowing sexually explicit content featuring OnlyFans model Alice Rosenblum — who was underage at the time — to circulate on Passes. Ginoza was not employed by Passes at the time of the alleged events, according to Passes and the site’s legal representation.
“Guo personally intervened to override Passes’ strict internal safety controls tailored for creators of social media content aged between 15 and 17 years old to strip and deprive Plaintiff of any protections offered by Passes against the exploitation of a minor,” the complaint alleged.
Just before the suit was filed, Passes banned all underage creators and wiped the site of their content, according to Forbes.
Lawyers for Guo filed a motion in April to dismiss the suit, which they slammed as a defamatory attempt to “pursue the ‘deep pockets’ of Passes, a successful start-up, and its wealthy founder.”
“This lawsuit is part of an orchestrated attempt to defame Passes and Ms. Guo, and these claims have no basis in reality,” Rollo Baker of Elsberg Baker & Maruri told The Post.
“Ms. Guo and Passes categorically reject the baseless allegations made against them in the lawsuit, which was only filed against them after they rejected a $15 million payment demand.”
In between founding Scale AI and Passes, Guo started a small investment firm known as Backend Capital.
Guo landed at No. 26 on Forbes’ list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women, while Swift came in at spot 21.
Swift still holds the title of world’s richest female musician with a net worth of $1.6 billion, after her blowout-success international Eras Tour pushed her into billionaire status in October 2023.
Diane Hendricks took the top spot, with a $22.3 billion net worth thanks to her company ABC Supply, one of the largest distributors of roofing, siding and windows in the country.
This story first appeared in the New York Post and was republished with permission.
Originally published as 30-year-old Lucy Guo usurps Taylor Swift as youngest self-made female billionaire
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