Lucy Guo

Lucy Guo (born 1994), the daughter of Chinese immigrants, dropped out of Carnegie Mellon on a Thiel Fellowship, designed products at Quora and Snapchat, and in 2016 co-founded Scale AI with Alexandr Wang. Scale built the data-labeling backbone that frontier AI labs train on. Guo left the company in 2018 after a dispute with Wang — but kept her equity.

The stake that made history

That decision proved historic. In April 2025, when a tender offer valued Scale AI at $25 billion, Forbes calculated that Guo’s roughly 5 percent stake had made her the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire, unseating Taylor Swift; Meta’s $14.3 billion investment later that year valued Scale at $29 billion. Guo responded to the milestone by text: “I don’t really think about it much, it’s a bit wild. Too bad it’s all on paper haha.” She has since become a fixture of business-press coverage for her frugal habits — Shein clothes, a Honda Civic — and her “act broke, stay rich” philosophy.

Guo now runs Passes, a creator-monetization platform she founded in 2022 after starting the venture fund Backend Capital. She argues AI will amplify rather than replace creative work, telling The Mirror in 2025 that AI frees creators to post more consistently and spend their time on relationships and creative work. Her optimism is unsurprising given her fortune was built supplying the AI boom — but it long predates the windfall.