Following in the footsteps of Taylor Swift and Scale AI’s Lucy Guo, Luana Lopes Lara has just been crowned the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire thanks to her prediction market startup, Kalshi, reaching an $11 billion valuation.
But before Wall Street even knew her name, she was training to be a professional ballerina in Rio, where she endured brutal 13-hour days.
According to a recent Forbes profile, her ballet teachers at Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil held lit cigarettes under her thigh to test how long she could hold it up to her ear, without getting burned.
She’d sit through academic classes from 7 a.m. to noon before training in ballet classes from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m., while also fighting off competition from fellow dancers who’d reportedly hide glass shards in each other’s shoes to sabotage one another.
After finally graduating in 2013, she spent nine months in Austria as a professional ballerina, before giving it all up to start again and study at MIT—this time, chasing her even bigger dream: to be the next Steve Jobs.
