You may not have heard of Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo, but she just passed Taylor Swift as the youngest self-made billionaire woman, though that’s all based on her ownership stake in a company she no longer works for, and might not even be profitable.

Just as the entertainment business has its “awards season” for big show-business names to win their honors and strut their importance, there is also an “awards season” for billionaires, which is happening right now. The month of April is when Forbes magazine reveals its annual billionaires list, measuring (and/or estimating) the net worth of the world’s wealthiest people. And then they do several follow-up articles of their more interesting findings, milking the list for everything it’s worth.


One of these follow-up findings will grab the attention of local AI startup types. As the Chronicle reports, the co-founder of SF-based AI startup Scale AI Lucy Guo has dethroned Taylor Swift as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire woman on the Forbes list, though this is an other-people’s-money calculation based on Scale AI’s recent $25 billion valuation.

“I don’t really think about it much, it’s a bit wild. Too bad it’s all on paper haha,” Guo told Forbes via text upon learning of her new billionaire status.

Taylor Swift is still worth more than Lucy Guo; Swift has an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion, Guo’s esteemed net worth is $1.25 billion. But at 30 years old, Guo had dethroned Swift as the youngest self-made woman on the billionaire’s list, as Swift is now 35 years old.

And one can certainly quibble with Forbes’ definition of “self-made,” which excludes those with specific inheritances or divorce payouts. Both Guo and Swift still came from wealthy families, and doors were opened for them in a way they were not for everyone. Swift’s father was a VP at Merrill Lynch, Guo’s parents were both electrical enginners in Fremont, and had the money to send her to Carnegie Mellon to study computer science, where she dropped out once she got a Thiel Fellowship from Peter Thiel. This is not exactly a hard-scrabble upbringing.


Guo went on to work at Facebook and Snapchat, before co-founding Scale AI with Alexandr Wang in 2016. Wang fired her in 2018, but she retains a 5% stake in the company, and now runs an OnlyFans competitor called Passes.

And Scale AI, while a big name in artificial intelligence, may not even be profitable. Wang claimed last year that “we expect to be profitable by the end of this year,” though it’s not clear that ever happened.  

And for the record, the wealthiest self-made woman on Forbes’ list is Melanie Perkins, the co-founder of an Australian software startup, as her net worth is estimated at $5.7 billion.

Related: Arnold Schwarzenegger Now a Billionaire, According to Forbes’ Latest List [SFist]

Images: (Left) @lucy_guo via Twitter, (Right) @taylorswift13 via Twitter