31 years old, 9 billion! The world's wealthiest woman born after 1990

Ask AI · How did Lucy Guo achieve a wealth comeback with vision after being fired?

Author: Douzhier

Source: Zhenghedao (ID: zhenghedao)

A few days ago, the Hurun Research Institute released the “Global Rich List.” Chinese-American woman Lucy Guo, with a fortune of 9 billion RMB, became the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world.

The youngest self-made female billionaire

Image source: Hurun Report

Before this, she was better known as the co-founder of the artificial intelligence company Scale AI—despite leaving the company in 2018.

On the day the news broke, Lucy Guo was in Miami.

When a reporter later asked her how she felt, she said, “I actually hadn’t thought about it much. It’s a bit crazy. Unfortunately, those are just numbers on paper.”

That year, she was 31 years old. The source of her wealth was a company she had left seven years earlier.

In 2018, she was fired from the company she co-founded.

When she left, she did one thing: she retained nearly 5% of her shares.

In 2025, Meta spent to acquire about 49% of Scale AI, and the company’s valuation skyrocketed to $25 billion.

Those shares she never sold transformed from $50 million to $1.25 billion.

Lucy Guo Image source: ins@guoforit

With a fortune of 9 billion RMB, born in the 90s, a Chinese-American woman, fired from the company she co-founded—these labels combine to create a nearly dramatic wealth story.

But what truly matters is not just that number.

When people talk about Lucy Guo, they are actually discussing a larger question: In an age where AI reshapes everything, what kind of judgment does a person need to stand firm in the tide?

“Alright, I need to make money”

Lucy Guo was born in 1994 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her parents are Chinese immigrants, both electrical engineers.

In the early 2000s, the tech bubble burst, and her parents both lost their jobs. Life at home became tight.

Years later, in an interview, she recalled, “Because of our poor family situation, I was often bullied at school. So I thought, alright, I need to make money.”

She was about six or seven years old that year.

She described herself as not being a “well-behaved child” from a young age, completely indifferent to the safe route planned by her parents. She was more concerned with one thing—how to make money.

During her student years, she self-studied technology, worked on projects, took gigs, and explored side hustles; as long as it was legal and could amplify her time and abilities, she would try it.

She didn’t believe in “waiting until I’m ready to start,” but rather jumped in, learning while running.

In second grade, her parents confiscated her cash. She didn’t cry; instead, she started doing one thing: making money online. She opened a PayPal account.

In the Neopets game, she discovered that players were willing to spend money to buy rare pets and game currency. She wrote scripts to farm equipment and resold it.

In sixth grade, she bought a domain for “unreleased TV shows,” created a fake play button with Photoshop, and made money through ad clicks.

In later interviews, she said that the core of everything she did back then was: find a need and then meet it.

Over those years, she earned a five-figure sum. Meanwhile, her parents were still trying to persuade her not to study electrical engineering. The reason was simple: it’s too hard for women to stand out in the tech field.

She didn’t listen.

After graduating from high school, she was admitted to Carnegie Mellon University, majoring in Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction.

In 2014, she was just a few courses away from getting a double degree but chose to drop out—she received the “Thiel Fellowship” from Peter Thiel. $100,000, with the condition that she had to start a full-time business.

She calculated the numbers. In the worst-case scenario: losing a few years but gaining experiences that others would never learn in a lifetime. In the best-case scenario: life-changing money.

“I think people overfocus on risk. They believe the risks are greater than they actually are.”

This decision was incomprehensible to her parents.

Years later, she recalled, “They thought it was a sign that I ‘didn’t love them.’ They weren’t very happy. But I was just betting on myself, choosing what I thought was a better future for me.”

The conflict with her parents, in her view, wasn’t rebellion; it was a difference in values: they pursued stability while she pursued freedom and choice.

She believed that making money isn’t greed but a tool for controlling one’s life—when you have cash flow and leverage, you aren’t tied down by any single path and don’t have to live up to others’ expectations.

Image source: Fortune

Looking back years later, this might have been the most crucial choice of her life.

Beyond the $100,000, it was about the decision itself—it transformed her from a person “learning how to make money” into a “value creator.”

Two dropouts

After dropping out, she interned at Facebook, then went to Snapchat, becoming the company’s first female designer. In 2015, she joined the Q&A platform Quora as a product designer.

There, she met an AI genius—Alexandr Wang. Also a second-generation Chinese-American, he also dropped out of a prestigious school and was equally fascinated by AI.

In 2016, a mutual friend proposed an idea: to create a “human API”—to allow AI companies to call upon human labor as needed to complete data annotation tasks.

Lucy later recalled, “When he said this, I thought, this is crazy. But it’s also a brilliant idea.”

That year, at 21, she and 19-year-old Alexandr founded Scale AI in an apartment in San Francisco.

In the early days of their startup, they struggled; the office was a basement provided by investors, and the tables were made from wooden boards. During recruitment, people would ask, “Why would we hire two kids?”

Fortunately, in 2018, the surge in autonomous driving led Scale AI to secure a contract with Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors.

That year, both made it onto Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list.

But it was also then that cracks began to appear.

Details of their split are scarce. Lucy only said, “We had different opinions.”

Image source: ins@guoforit

Reports suggested that Alexandr wanted aggressive funding and rapid expansion, while Lucy preferred lean operations and refining products.

The differences couldn’t be reconciled.

As CEO, Alexandr fired the co-founder.

“But I am proud of what Scale AI has achieved,” she said. Graceful, restrained, no complaints.

5% comeback

When she left, she retained nearly 5% of her shares. At that time, Scale AI was valued at about $1 billion. Those 5% of shares had a paper value of about $50 million.

For a 22-year-old girl who was shown the door, this was already a considerable sum. Many would choose to cash out and start a new life with that money.

Lucy didn’t. In later interviews, she said, “I did a small secondary offering and then invested the money.”

Image source: ins@guoforit

The next part of the story is one of the craziest in AI history.

In 2023, ChatGPT exploded globally, and Scale AI’s valuation soared from $7.3 billion to $13.8 billion. By 2025, Meta spent to acquire about 49% of Scale AI, pushing the company’s valuation to $25 billion.

That nearly 5% of shares she held grew in value from $50 million to $1.25 billion.

She set a record: becoming the only woman in the world to enter the billionaire ranks through founding shares after exiting a company.

Was it foresight or luck? Perhaps both.

But one detail is worth noting: during those years when Scale AI’s valuation skyrocketed, she never sold.

After leaving Scale AI, Lucy didn’t stop.

In 2019, she founded the venture capital firm Backend Capital. In 2020, she made a six-figure bet on the financial software company Ramp—now valued over $30 billion.

In 2022, she founded Passes, a platform that helps creators monetize. Between 2022 and 2024, Passes raised $50 million in three rounds of financing, reaching a valuation of $150 million.

She said, “Creators are entrepreneurs. If you have 1,000 super fans willing to spend $5 a day on you, that’s a stable income.”

But more surprising than these is her lifestyle.

In an interview with Fortune, she revealed that she still buys clothes on Shein, at $10 a piece.

Her assistant drives a “rather old” Honda Civic to take her to work. She looks for “buy one get one free” deals on Uber Eats.

She even once did this: booked a refundable plane ticket, went through security, entered the airport lounge for a free meal, then canceled the ticket and left.

“Look broke, stay rich,” she laughed.

Image source: ins@guoforit

She observed that millionaires often love to show off—designer clothes, nice cars, luxury watches. Because they still need to prove themselves.

And true billionaires, on the other hand, tend to wear T-shirts and jeans. They no longer need to prove anything to anyone.

“I fully admit that I’ve gone through that phase. When I felt less secure, I also spent crazily, thinking I needed to showcase something,” she said. “But later I realized: why waste money on unimportant things?”

On Instagram, she posted celebrating her completion of her 3,000th workout session. The caption was just six words: “Discipline over sleep.”

She once described her day: waking up at 5:30 AM, going to Barry’s Bootcamp for high-intensity interval training. Then a 12-hour workday lasting until 10 PM.

She never cooks for herself and rarely takes vacations; even while on holiday, she works at least eight hours a day.

“Theoretically, I could work until midnight, then go clubbing until 2 AM, then sleep and wake up at 6 AM to work out,” she said. “Seven hours of sleep is enough.”

Not everyone can handle such a pace. But she seems to be born for it. She claims to have inherited a gene from her parents that allows her to work almost without sleep.

Although her parents are still concerned about her dropping out to start a business, their almost harsh frugality and discipline have become part of her blood.

Their AI era

On the same list where Lucy became the female billionaire, there’s another name: Wang Shuo.

At 36 years old, from northeastern China, she founded the HR technology company Deel. In 2019, she established the company based on her keen insight into the remote working trend.

In the following years, Deel accurately addressed the pain points of global hiring, with a valuation soaring to $17.3 billion (approximately 120 billion RMB).

Now, Wang Shuo stands alongside Lucy on the Hurun Global Rich List.

And there’s Hong Letong.

Born in 2001 in Guangzhou, this girl wrote “MIT” on a piece of draft paper at 14. She actually went to MIT, then to Oxford and Stanford.

In 2024, after a deep conversation at a café near Stanford with then Meta AI research director Shubho Sengupta, she decided to drop out of Stanford to start Axiom Math.

Image source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This company uses AI to solve math problems, and in less than a year, its valuation soared to $1.6 billion.

On her team is Ken Ono, a 57-year-old math authority—this former vice president of the American Mathematical Society resigned from his tenure at the University of Virginia to “work for” a 24-year-old student.

An investor described her: “She is the most impressive founder I’ve seen in my two decades in Silicon Valley.”

Lucy, Wang Shuo, and Hong Letong come from different backgrounds and take different paths, but they share a commonality: they all bet on AI and got it right.

The “2026 Hurun Global Rich List” shows that new faces in the AI sector take prominent positions among self-made female billionaires.

Daniela Amodei of Anthropic, Mira Murati of Thinking Machines Lab, Lisa Su of AMD… these names appear on the list for the first time.

This is a snapshot of an era: women are flooding from traditional manufacturing and consumer sectors into the hard tech arena.

Behind this is the explosive growth of the global AI industry.

In 2025, total financing in the AI sector surpassed $200 billion, equivalent to the total of the previous decade. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Scale AI have repeatedly set new valuation records, creating vast wealth.

The most significant feature of this wealth creation movement is its unprecedented youthfulness.

The “2026 Hurun U40 Global Self-Made Billionaire List” shows that 27 billion-dollar entrepreneurs emerged in the AI field, with an average age of only 32.

The three founders of Mercor are all 22 years old, breaking the record for the youngest self-made billionaires in the world. They are younger than Mark Zuckerberg was at 23.

“Every era’s innovation is often led by young people,” said Fu Jixun, managing partner of GGV Capital, “because young people have no burdens.”

“Don’t wait to be pushed”

Lucy Guo is not a “tech genius” in the traditional sense. Her programming skills were learned from Neopets in order to farm equipment. She learned technology to make money; this she never conceals.

In an interview with CNBC, she said, “I don’t think of myself as a genius. I just am more willing to stay up late and study.”

But she does possess a certain ability: calculating risks.

She calculated that the risks of dropping out to start a business were overestimated—the worst outcome would just be returning to school; the risks of retaining shares were overestimated too—the worst outcome was merely losing a paper fortune.

She also calculated the relationship between lifestyle and wealth accumulation—many people increase their living costs after earning more, resulting in failure to save money.

She said, “The more money you save, the more you can invest, and this situation exacerbates over time.”

This is her advice to young people. Not “follow your passion,” or “believe in yourself,” but rather: be frugal and live within your means.

Image source: Getty Images -Gonzalo Marroquin

There’s another dimension to her story: she is a second-generation Chinese-American. Her parents, like many immigrants, believe “stability is above all.”

They hoped she would find a stable job and avoid the tech industry. They used their unemployment experience to advise her: “Do you see? The tech bubble burst, and we both lost our jobs. Do you still want to go this route?”

Lucy didn’t listen. But she also acknowledged that her parents’ frugality and emphasis on money had deeply influenced her. “They always emphasized that having money is important.”

This contradiction of “valuing money while not being tied to it” can be seen in many second-generation Chinese-Americans. They inherit their parents’ practicality and diligence while yearning to break free from the constraints of the “safe route.”

Alexandr Wang’s parents were physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and when the 19-year-old dropped out of MIT, they probably found it hard to accept.

Hong Letong’s parents were ordinary workers in Guangzhou, and when she decided to drop out of Stanford to start a business, they probably felt anxious.

But they succeeded.

These second-generation Chinese-American entrepreneurs share a common trait: they are more pragmatic than white entrepreneurs and bolder than local Chinese entrepreneurs. The intersection of two cultures shapes their unique way of doing things.

“Honestly, I feel like that little girl. Life after having money hasn’t changed much,” she said, which isn’t an act. She still shops on Shein, and her assistant still drives that old Honda.

She just has an additional label: the youngest self-made female billionaire born in the 90s globally.

That label will soon be replaced by new names. But what she represents, apart from the name, is also a question: in an era where AI reconstructs everything, what kind of judgment must one possess to stand firm in the tide?

From learning to use PayPal at eight, founding Scale AI at 21, to becoming a female billionaire at 31, she has been doing the same thing:

Searching for certainty in uncertainty, and then turning bets into reality with extraordinary execution.

Image source: ins@guoforit

Those being pushed by the AI wave often anxiously ask: what should I do? And Lucy Guo’s answer is:

From the very beginning, don’t wait to be pushed.

She has never waited. From second grade onward, she understood one principle: no one will make money for you, and no one will judge for you. You can only do it yourself.

This is also why, when people ask her the secret to her success, her answer is so simple: “Be frugal, always live below your means.”

This statement sounds like financial advice but is actually about “freedom.”

When you don’t need to prove yourself through spending, and you don’t need to fill insecurity with material things, you gain true choice:

The choice of when to enter, when to exit, and when to hold firm.

The girl who learned to use PayPal at eight continues to live the same way years later: calculating, judging, and then betting.

Because fate never favors those who wait.

Reference materials:

[1]. “Hurun Richest Self-Made Women in the World 2026,” Hurun Report

[2]. “Scale AI’s 30-year-old billionaire founder still shops at Shein and pulls up to work in a Honda Civic,” FORTUNE

[3]. “Meet Lucy Guo, the college-dropout AI founder who overtook Taylor Swift as world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire,” VN EXPRESS

[4]. “90后女首富诞生,” 投资界

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Proofreading | Zhengfeng Editor-in-Chief | Xia Kun