The first time people heard the name Lucy Guo wasn’t two months ago, when she overtook Taylor Swift to become the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, according to Forbes. It was a few years earlier, when she was living in a luxury high-rise in Miami, in a $6.1 million apartment, and hosted a wild party that featured—not just loud friends—but also a lemur and a snake. Her neighbors, including David Beckham, were far from pleased, and the building management reprimanded her.

You can understand why the neighbors were upset, but Guo’s extreme workaholism—90 hours a week, with a schedule starting at 5:30 a.m. and ending at midnight—is what brought her to billionaire status by age 30. That kind of grind apparently also calls for equally extreme ways to blow off steam. So she does four high-intensity strength workouts a day, dances for hours to electronic music, goes skydiving, and if there’s time left in the day, she sleeps. If not—she doesn’t. “I don’t watch TV or TikToks, so that gives me a lot of extra hours in the day,” Guo once explained. “I’m constantly on the move. I got the DNA from my immigrant parents to never sleep. People don’t understand how much work it takes to get here. They see the headlines, but not the 18-hour workdays.”

Guo’s fortune comes from Scale AI, a data-labeling AI startup she launched in 2016 with Alexandr Wang, when she was just 21. She left two years later but kept about 5% of the shares. That small slice turned into massive profit this past April when Scale AI was valued at $25 billion, making Guo’s stake worth an estimated $1.2 billion. She isn’t fazed by the new title. “I feel like that title changes every year,” she told the New York Post. “It almost means nothing to me personally. The only difference is I get more DMs, a lot of celebrities try to hang out with me, and if I happen to be in a photo next to Orlando Bloom, people think I’m dating him. But now I’m more careful. Are all these new people interested because they think I’m hot? Do they want advice? Or are they just hoping for a ride in my pajamas?”

Act Broke, Stay Rich

Lucy Guo’s story begins in San Francisco, where she was born to engineer parents who immigrated from China. She began coding in second grade, though her parents hoped she’d grow out of it. “In a Chinese immigrant household there’s definitely a cultural expectation for the child to become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer,” she told NextShark. “Ultimately, the desire for your child to be stable and successful is the root of that pressure. But honestly, I always knew my path would be a little different. The interesting twist is that many of the immigrant values I learned at home—hard work, resourcefulness, persistence—are exactly what you need to succeed even on the path I chose.”

When she got to college, Guo studied computer science and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, but dropped out after just one year when she received a $100,000 fellowship from billionaire Peter Thiel. The condition of Thiel’s fellowship is that recipients must leave traditional schooling to develop their own projects. Guo took the offer. She interned at Facebook, became the first designer at Snapchat, and there met Wang, her future Scale AI co-founder.

“The reason most billionaires dress in T-shirts, jeans, and hoodies is because they’ve finished proving themselves to the rest of the world. That’s kind of how I feel now. No one’s going to think I’m broke because I drive a Honda Civic.”

Unable to sit still for two minutes, Guo left Scale AI after just two years and entered the most festive period of her young life. After the now-famous Miami party, she decided to slam the brakes. She moved back to the West Coast, bought a $4.2 million home in Los Angeles, and founded Backend Capital, a venture capital firm investing in startups. In 2022, she launched Passes—a creator-driven platform already generating six-figure incomes for influencers, YouTubers, podcasters, and even astrologers. Passes aims to be a, shall we say, more respectable alternative to OnlyFans, with a strict ban on sexual content. Nevertheless, Guo faced a class-action lawsuit this year alleging the platform did host such content. “These claims don’t match our investigation,” she told the Post. “Bad actors will always be bad actors, and we just do our best to try to prevent it.”

Guo is well aware she has a representative role. “When I was growing up, I didn’t see many company founders who looked like me,” she told NextShark. “And the women who became famous in tech often fit a certain mold I never saw myself in. I’ve become more aware of visibility because representation really matters and makes a difference for the next generations. I didn’t have that privilege when I tried to start my first company. Now I understand that authentic representation is not just faces in photos or meeting quotas—it’s diverse perspectives influencing decisions at every level. I also feel a responsibility to be honest about my journey. Success, especially in tech, is not just about brilliant ideas—it’s about access to capital and opportunities that are not distributed equally. So being in the rooms where decisions are made allows me to push for systemic change from within. As an Asian-American woman, it was really frustrating to constantly deal with people telling me I must have won hackathons or gotten jobs just because I was a woman.”

Billionaires in T-Shirts

While she downplays the significance of topping Forbes’ list and surpassing Taylor Swift, Guo has some interesting insights on how becoming a billionaire has changed her lifestyle. First, the richer she gets, the less she spends. She told Fortune she still shops at Shein, the fast-fashion retailer known for trendy clothes at low prices, and drives a Honda Civic—or rather, her assistant drives it. “Act broke, stay rich—that’s my motto,” she said. “I don’t like spending money.”