Who is Lucy Guo? Skateboarding college dropout who dethroned Taylor Swift as youngest self-made billionaire
Lucy Guo, a 30-year-old entrepreneur and co-founder of Scale AI, has overtaken pop superstar Taylor Swift to become the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, according to Forbes. A hard-partying college dropout who rides an electric skateboard to work when she’s not being chauffeured by an assistant, Guo’s rise comes amid the ongoing artificial intelligence boom, with her investments and ventures capitalising on the tech industry's explosive growth.
With a current estimated net worth of $1.3 billion, Guo has not only joined the exclusive club of self-made women billionaires under 40 but now holds the top spot as the youngest—an honour previously held by Swift following the unprecedented success of her Eras Tour.
Who is Lucy Guo?
Born on 14 October 1994 in Fremont, California, Guo was raised by Chinese immigrant parents who both worked as electrical engineers. Despite their technical backgrounds, her parents were sceptical about her pursuing a career in technology, fearing the odds were stacked against women in the field.
Guo, however, demonstrated early interest in tech, learning to code in primary school. By her teenage years, she was creating bots for online games like Neopets and selling in-game assets for profit. She later enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University to study computer science but dropped out in 2014 after being selected for the Thiel Fellowship — a $100,000 grant for young entrepreneurs.
After interning at Facebook and joining Snapchat as its first female designer — where she helped develop Snap Maps — Guo went on to work at Quora. It was there she met Alexandr Wang, with whom she would co-found Scale AI in 2016.
Net worth and how she earned it
Guo’s fortune primarily stems from her five percent stake in Scale AI, a company she co-founded with Wang when she was 21 and he was 19. Though she exited the company in 2018 following disagreements over its direction, her retained equity has ballooned in value.
Scale AI, which helps label data used by firms like OpenAI and Google’s parent company Alphabet, is now reportedly valued at $25 billion after a tender offer expected to close soon. Guo’s share is estimated to be worth around $1.2 billion, according to Forbes.
After leaving Scale, Guo launched Backend Capital, a venture capital firm, and later founded ‘Passes’ in 2022. The platform, billed as a more family-friendly version of OnlyFans or Patreon, allows content creators to keep 90% of their earnings. The startup raised $40 million in a Series A funding round last year, further boosting Guo’s net worth.
She now splits her time between Los Angeles and a luxurious apartment in Miami. Guo, who describes herself as a “savage personality” online, admits she never cooks, orders everything via Uber Eats, and often 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 said in a 2022 interview.
Allegations and legal troubles
According to The New York Post, despite her tech-savvy success and flashy lifestyle, Guo and Passes are now under legal scrutiny. In February, a class-action lawsuit accused the platform of allowing child pornography. The suit alleges that Passes knowingly circulated explicit content involving underage model Alice Rosenblum, implicating the company’s talent director Lani Ginoza and agent Alec Celestin.
More notably, the complaint claims 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.”
Just before the suit was filed, Passes banned all underage creators and scrubbed related content from the site. In April, Guo’s legal team filed a motion to dismiss, describing the case as an attempt to go after “deep pockets.”
“This lawsuit is part of an orchestrated attempt to defame Passes and Ms. Guo, and these claims have no basis in reality,” said Rollo Baker, a lawyer representing Guo. “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.”
Where she ranks now
Guo entered the 2025 Forbes list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women at No. 26, surpassing Swift — who now ranks at No. 21 — in terms of youngest billionaire status. Swift still holds the crown as the richest female musician in the world with a $1.6 billion fortune.
Guo is one of only six self-made women billionaires under the age of 40. Her rise from a coding teen to a high-flying AI mogul symbolises the power of tech entrepreneurship in the modern era — though not without its share of controversy.