Luana Lopes Lara: Prediction market payout

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:07)
It's 2012, we're in a ballet studio in Brazil. A teenage girl balances on one toe, the other leg pulled impossibly high, and she holds her breath. Beneath her raised thigh, a cigarette ember glows, almost close enough to scorch her skin, but not quite touching.
This cigarette is held by her teacher, waiting to see which will break first, the muscle or the girl's will.

**Simon Jack** (0:29)
But she doesn't waver, and this discipline and determination will mean that in just over a decade, our ballerina will be a billionaire. Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Each episode we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:47)
We take them from zero to their first million, and then from their million on to a billion.

**Simon Jack** (0:52)
I'm Simon Jack, I'm the BBC's business editor.

**Zing Tsjeng** (0:54)
And I'm Zing Tsjeng, and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

**Simon Jack** (0:56)
So our billionaire this episode is Luana Lopes Lara, just 30 years old, currently worth $2.6 billion. That makes her the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world, beating one of our former billionaires.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:09)
Yep, sorry, Lucy Gwell, you are no longer in the top spot. Now, you may not have heard of Luana. She's kept her personal life largely private. It's actually quite hard to find out that much about her. But don't worry, because there is a lot to talk about in this episode.

**Simon Jack** (1:23)
And that's because Luana, along with her business partner, founded the financial tech company Kalshi, Arabic for everything. And that's an important name.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:33)
Kalshi is at the forefront of something that's been called gambling. But in her words, it's just another form of trading.

**Simon Jack** (1:40)
Trading or gambling, a very important distinction, as we'll discover. Now, Kalshi is a prediction market. What the hell is that?
Well, it lets anyone place a bet on the outcome of an event, any event in the world. And that was something that was, up until Luana came along, completely illegal in the United States.

**Zing Tsjeng** (1:59)
Yeah, as Luana says, they'd look for events that had been ripped directly from the headlines. So, for instance, you go on to Kalshi, you might be able to place a trade on how much snow will fall in New York during a particularly bad snowstorm.

**Simon Jack** (2:12)
Who will win the Winter Olympics, Men's Hockey Gold Medal?

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:15)
What will be the price of a rare LaBouBou doll?

**Simon Jack** (2:18)
And of course, who will win the next US presidential election?

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:22)
You can think of Kalshi as being like the love child between Wall Street and Vegas. So, the whole world is a casino and everyone a player.

**Simon Jack** (2:29)
But crucially, in the United States, it is not actually considered gambling or betting.

**Zing Tsjeng** (2:35)
Why? Well, let's travel back to the beginning to find out. You can bet it's going to be quite the story.

**Simon Jack** (2:48)
Luana Lopes Lara was born in 1996 in Brazil. As a child, she lived in various cities around the country, ending up as a teenager in Juanville. Her family was big on maths. Her mother was a math teacher. Even her father was an electoral engineer who had worked at IBM. Her older sister got a degree in chemical engineering and a PhD in industrial engineering, smart family. Not surprising then that Luana attended the Tupi Technical School, which focused on teaching sciences.

**Zing Tsjeng** (3:15)
But her first real passion was ballet. Maybe this is one of the first ever ballet billionaires we've ever covered. So in 2011, at the age of around 16 or 17, she enrolled in a ballet school called the Escola de Teatro Bolshoi.
This is the only branch outside of Russia of the celebrated, sometimes controversial Bolshoi Ballet Company. The Brazilian school granted 100 percent of scholarships to all students. But you can bet there was a rigorous selection process. And Luana caused these high school years the most intense of her life. And this is someone who, you know, at one point built a $11 billion start-up.

**Simon Jack** (3:52)
And you say rigorous. The days were exactly that. Academic classes were from 7 a.m. till noon, and then ballet classes 1 to 9 p.m. She's just a teenager, remember?
And this ballet school emphasizes, I think like most of them do, the importance of discipline. She claimed her ballet teachers held lit cigarettes, as we were hearing, under her thigh while she extended one leg to her ear to see how long she could keep her leg up without getting burned. And this environment did not exactly build camaraderie among the students there. She also claimed that dancers would hide glass, shards in each other's shoes in order to injure their rivals and get ahead. We couldn't actually find any response from the school of teachers to those particular claims.