Lucy Guo dethroning Taylor Swift as youngest self-made female billionaire shows drastic shift in how entrepreneurs find their path to billions in the modern era
Last week, tech entrepreneur Lucy Guo, 30, unseated Taylor Swift, 35, as the world's youngest self-made female billionaire, with Forbes estimating Guo's $1.3 billion net worth from her five per cent stake in Scale AI, valued at $25 billion.
Swift, with a reported $US1.6 billion fortune, reclaimed ownership of her masters for her first six albums for $360 million, cementing her status as the richest female musician of all time.
These milestones highlight the evolving landscape of ultra wealth creation in the modern era.
Beyond perhaps the enjoyment of escapism that comes with reading these remarkable stories, why should we care?
Well, because the path to billions impacts us all – from the innovations they unlock to the trickle-down economics they may (or may not) create, to the cultural shifts they reveal in how 'wealth worshipping' has evolved over time. The History of Billionaire Status
Self-made billionaires have reshaped economies since the Industrial Revolution, with around 5,000 emerging in inflation-adjusted terms, per historians like Thomas Piketty.
Gilded Age titans like Andrew Carnegie ($309 billion, adjusted, North America) and John D. Rockefeller ($400 billion, North America) built empires in steel and oil, while Asia's Mir Osman Ali Khan ($230 billion) leveraged trade.
The table below shows billionaire growth, with their share of global population rising from 0.0014 per cent in the 1930s to 0.0123 per cent in the 2010s, reflecting globalisation and the rise of tech as the biggest wealth-maker known to humankind.
It also reveals the changing nature of global economics, with the US dominating last century (70 per cent of all billionaires in the 1920s) but Asia's share growing to 40 per cent by the 2010s, driven by tech and manufacturing.
Historically, wealth took decades to build — Andrew Carnegie was 52, Rockefeller 54 — but it was built on durable industrial empires, if vulnerable to regulation and anti-trust law. The Path to Billions Today
Today, the path to billions is much faster revealing the speed-to-market enabled by tech, financial instruments, and global fame.
The global tech industry, now valued at over $5 trillion in 2024, grows rapidly through innovation, with high-margin profit pools in software (e.g., SaaS) and hardware (e.g., smartphones).
Jeff Bezos, worth $250 billion, is perhaps the best example of modern tech's path, having founded Amazon and scaled it through e-commerce dominance and AWS's cloud computing profits.
Finance, a $10 trillion market, grows steadily at four to six per cent annually, with profits from banking, insurance, asset management, and now crypto fueling the rise (and fall, in the case of Sam Bankman-Freid) of mega billionaires over the past half century.
Ray Dalio, with $15.4 billion, built his fortune founding Bridgewater Associates, leveraging high-fee hedge fund strategies and consistent returns.
And then there's the $2.5 trillion Media industry growing at three to five per cent.
While not as large as Tech and Finance, it punches above its weight given the 'fame factor' and has also experienced some of the largest sector redefining disruptions in the last two decades.
Jay-Z, worth $2.5 billion and reportedly the richest musician of all time and Taylor Swift worth $1.6 billion, best represent media's path to billions, amassed through music sales, tours, and diversified ventures in fashion and lucrative brand partnerships proving the value of fame and global fanbases.
In aggregate since 2000, tech has minted ~800 billionaires, entertainment ~100, and finance ~600.
The under-40 cohort, led by tech (70 per cent), includes 25 billionaires under 34 with $110 billion, per Forbes 2025. What Tomorrow May Bring
Over the next decade, ultra-wealth creation will likely accelerate, driven by AI, biotech, and decentralised platforms.
The US is expected to continue dominating the AI landscape, from Sam Altman to Alexander Wang.
But the path to billions will continue to globalise beyond the US.
Examples include India's Deepinder Goyal, founder of Zomato, who is expected to join the billionaire club as the food delivery platform expands across Asia's booming markets.
In Africa, Nigeria's Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, co-founder of Flutterwave, is a strong contender with his fintech unicorn streamlining payments across the continent.
In Southeast Asia, Indonesia's Nadiem Makarim, behind Gojek's super-app empire, is well-positioned as digital economies flourish.
These rising stars, leveraging scalable tech and emerging market growth, signal a shift toward younger, self-made billionaires in emerging markets at a pace not seen before.
So, what might be the societal impact of this continued acceleration of the path to billions?
Historically, industrialists drove 20 per cent of economic gains to the bottom 50 per cent via jobs and infrastructure.
Today, expect to see the continued concentration of wealth in fewer hands by the very nature of the modern technologically driven economy that is built on exponentially increasing automation, scalability and operational leverage.
Trillion-dollar fortunes may emerge, but job displacement and wage disparity may widen as traditional economic trickle-down effects diminish from these innovations.
On the other hand, democratised access to AI tools, education, and decentralised finance could empower individuals to innovate and build wealth independently, with the AI revolution expected to take the 'individual creator economy' to levels never before seen.
Finally, it must be remembered that technology-based wealth creation has led to an unprecedented democratisation of information access and flow, which is arguably the most powerful trickle-down effect of all.
Kosha Gada is a tech entrepreneur who also serves as a board member of sports betting platform PointsBet. She is a broadcast commentator on US and international current affairs, appearing live three nights a week on Sky News Australia
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