Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Thursday, December 4th.

Today on Forbes, how Kalshys' co-founder went from professional ballerina to world's youngest self-made woman billionaire.

Luana Lopez Lara graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in computer science,

spent college summers working for Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin's Citadel,

and she built an $11 billion startup in just six years.

Yet the Brazilian native still calls high school the, quote,

most intense years of her life.

Her ballet teachers at Bolshoi Theatre School in Brazil held lit cigarettes under her thigh while she extended one leg to her ear.

It was a test to see how long she could keep that leg up without getting burned.

Fellow dancers would hide glass shards in each other's shoes to get ahead, and the cutthroat program

required her to take academic classes from 7 a.m. to noon before taking ballet classes from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.

But her mind was always set on grander ambitions, wanting to become the next Steve Jobs.

In part inspired by her math teacher mother and electrical engineer father, Lopez Lara would study well into the night for academic

competitions, winning gold at the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and bronze at the Santa Catarina

Mathematics Olympiad. Following high school graduation, she performed as a professional ballerina

in Austria for nine months before hanging up her point shoes to attend MIT and fulfill her

ambitions in America. Now, at age 29, Lopez Lara has just become the youngest self-made

woman billionaire on Earth. Unseating 31-year-old

scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo, who took the title from Taylor Swift in April.

Lopez Lara and her co-founder, Tarek Mansour, also 29 years old, both moved into the

three-coma club after their prediction market firm Kalshi raised $1 billion

at an $11 billion valuation.

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