Brazilian Luana Lopez Lara, 29, has become the youngest woman in the world to build her own fortune, after the value of her prediction market platform, Calci, reached US$11 billion (R$58.63 billion). She is the co-founder of the company, and her net worth is estimated at US$1.3 billion (R$6.93 billion) after a round that raised US$1 billion (R$5.33 billion), led by Paradigm and with the participation of giants such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator.
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According to Forbes, this achievement is the latest chapter in a path marked by discipline since his formative years. Before MIT, Luana studied ballet at the Bolshoi Theater School, where she lived in a highly competitive environment: training with lit cigarettes to test resistance, broken glass hidden in sneakers, and days starting at 7 a.m. and ending at 9 p.m. Besides ballet, she studied late for the Academic Olympiad, winning medals in astronomy and mathematics.
After nine months of working as a professional dancer in Austria, she decided to change direction and enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she graduated in computer science. He interned at management companies Bridgewater Associates, owned by Ray Dalio, and Citadel, owned by Ken Griffin, and met his future partner Tariq Mansour, also 29 years old.
Kalci’s idea came during an evening walk in New York, when they both envisioned a market that would allow the odds of future events, such as elections and sports results, to be traded. The duo joined Y Combinator in 2019, and the company has grown rapidly: it was valued at US$2 billion in June, US$5 billion in October, and surpassed US$11 billion in December, doubling its trading volume.
While Luana has become one of the faces of the new global generation of billionaires, Brazil is also attracting attention in the Forbes rankings with two sisters considered among the youngest in the world. Livia Voigt, 20, is the youngest billionaire on the planet today, with a fortune of US$1.1 billion (R$5.5 billion) thanks to her 3.1% stake in WEG, a Santa Catarina multinational founded by her grandfather, Werner Ricardo Voigt. Livia, a psychology student, does not hold a position in the company, but inherited the stake after her grandfather died in 2016.
His sister Dora Voigt de Asis, 27 years old, also appears among the youngest billionaires. Dora graduated in architecture, and has the same assets and the same stake in WEG, although she maintains a secret life on social media and does not run the company.