Lucy Guo: The woman training AI

Summary

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Good Bad Billionaire: "Lucy Guo – The Woman Training AI"

Podcast: Good Bad Billionaire (BBC World Service)
Date: January 26, 2026
Hosts: Simon Jack (BBC Business Editor) & Zing Tsjeng (Journalist, Author, Podcaster)

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the extraordinary rise of Lucy Guo, the youngest self-made female billionaire as of 2025, and the enigmatic co-founder of Scale AI—a pivotal but little-known company powering much of the world’s AI revolution. Simon Jack and Zing Tsjeng explore Guo’s scrappy, unconventional journey, from a frugal kid in the Bay Area to Silicon Valley stardom, and dissect the controversies, impact, and quirks of an elusive billionaire whose life and business blend ruthless hustle with a surprising dose of thrift. The hosts apply their signature playful scorecard to Guo’s wealth, philanthropy, power, and controversy, leaving listeners to decide: is Lucy Guo good, bad, or just another billionaire?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Early Life & Money Mindset

• Background: Born 1994 in the Bay Area to Chinese immigrant electrical engineers. Family faced layoffs, lived frugally.
  • “Her parents…sacrificed everything. Quitting school feels like a slap in the face.” (Zing Tsjeng, 01:39)
• Driven by money from a young age: selling Pokémon cards, colored pencils, mowing lawns, learning coding to maximize profits.
  • “I basically became obsessed as a little kid. I was like, how do I make as much money as possible?” (Lucy Guo, via BBC, referenced by Simon Jack, 03:33)
• At just 8 or 9, set up her own PayPal to evade parental confiscation of money—precocious even by Silicon Valley standards.

Timestamps:

• Parental reactions and early money schemes [01:24–04:40]

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2. Tech Ambition, Education, & the Thiel Fellowship

• Academically pressured but preferred computers: hacking, creating bots for profit on games like Neopets.
  • “At age 9, she worked out how to get the keylogger off her computer.” (Simon Jack, 05:18)
• Hackathons at Carnegie Mellon led to the $100,000 Thiel Fellowship—but only if she dropped out, causing a rift with her family.
  • “You’re an idiot.” —Guo’s parents on her dropout decision (Zing Tsjeng, 01:39)
  • “It's almost a requirement to drop out. Gates, Elon Musk...Zuckerberg. It’s a long list.” (Simon Jack, 10:52)

Timestamps:

• Tech childhood & hackathons [04:43–09:50]
• Thiel Fellowship & family conflict [09:50–11:24]

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3. Startup Hustle, Failures & Formation of Scale AI

• Multiple early startup attempts—Nomit (food delivery), Ava (healthcare app)—all quick failures, but learning steps.
• Joined Y Combinator (run by Sam Altman), tried and pivoted through various ideas before Scale AI emerged.
  • “They searched for some new ideas...A roommate suggested 'API for humans.’” (Simon Jack, 14:12)
• Scale AI: starting as a platform for outsourced data labeling, targeting the AI models that power self-driving cars, chatbots, etc.
  • “In the first few days, Guo was responding to some of the API requests herself.” (Simon Jack, 16:52)
  • Recruited hundreds of freelance contractors in the Philippines – leveraging a massive, tech-literate English-speaking workforce.

Timestamps:

• Startup pivots and Y Combinator [11:24–16:14]
• ‘API for humans’ & origins of Scale AI [14:12–16:24]
• Outsourcing and recruitment strategies [16:24–18:31]

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4. Rise, Growth & Controversies at Scale AI

• Early clients: Uber, Procter & Gamble, Google.
• Massive growth: $4.5 million series A, then unicorn status by 2019 with Peter Thiel’s investment.
• Allegations of labor exploitation: low pay, delayed payments, and use of platforms like RemoteTasks.
  • “Workers...said their pay per job went from dollars to cents.” (Simon Jack, 28:13)
• Guo’s departure in 2018 after a rift with co-founder Alexandr Wang—unanswered public disputes about her exit, but she retained a sizeable equity stake.

Timestamps:

• Scale AI’s growth and labor outsourcing [16:52–22:05]
• Co-founder split & labor controversies [20:45–28:13]
• Scale AI’s role in broader AI ecosystem [27:07–28:52]

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5. Venture Capital, New Startups & Lifestyle

• Founded Backend Capital (VC fund)—early investments in unicorns like Ramp.
• Launched Passes (creator economy subscription platform) in 2022, aiming to let creators take more of their earnings home.

Legal and Reputation Issues:

• Passes sued by rival for trade secret theft (denied) [25:18]
• More serious: 2025 lawsuit alleging distribution of child sexual abuse material (denied; case ongoing as of release).

Lifestyle:

• Acts frugally: skateboards to work, hunts deals, couchsurfs; “Buy and act broke, stay rich.”
  • “She once bought and returned a plane ticket just to access an airport lounge for free.” (Zing Tsjeng, 35:24)
• But also throws lavish parties, owns luxury properties, and occasionally splurges.
  • “She owns homes in Miami, Las Vegas, Louisiana...once hosted a party with 100 guests, a lemur and a snake.” (Simon Jack, 34:45)

Timestamps:

• Move into VC and Passes [22:05–25:14]
• Lawsuits & controversies around Passes [25:14–26:14]
• Lavish-yet-frugal lifestyle details [34:05–36:01]

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6. Billionaire Status & Paper Wealth

• By 2025, with Scale AI’s $25 billion valuation, Guo’s remaining stake made her a paper billionaire.
  • “She recorded her reaction to the news, which was broken to her over text by a reporter from Forbes, being ‘lmao. But it’s all on paper.’” (Zing Tsjeng, 29:56)
• Prefers to leverage equity for loans versus selling—reflects current Silicon Valley billionaire culture.

Timestamps:

• Hitting billionaire status, reactions, wealth structuring [29:04–34:11]

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7. Impact, Philanthropy, & Scorecard

• Impact: Scale AI crucial to progress of autonomous vehicles, large AI models—though more a vital cog than a charismatic visionary.
  • “Progress in autonomous vehicles, voice assistants would have been much slower.” (Zing Tsjeng, 27:07)
• Philanthropy: No major pledges or public giving documented yet; says tackling human trafficking is a long-term aim.
• Controversy: Ongoing lawsuits, questions about worker treatment; some parallels made to broader tech industry trends.

Scorecard Highlights

• Wealth: Simon: 3/10, Zing: 7/10 (“Youngest self-made female billionaire—impressive, but frugal.”)
• Controversy: Both: 5/10 (“Industry-standard issues; still unresolved.”)
• Philanthropy: Simon: 2/10, Zing: 2/10 (“Little public giving so far, but still young.”)
• Power & Legacy: Simon: 2/10, Zing: 3/10 (“Not a Musk or Thiel; more to come, possibly.”)

Timestamps:

• Scorecard discussion and debate [36:08–41:39]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You’re an idiot.” —Guo’s parents on dropping out (Zing Tsjeng, 01:39)
• “I basically became obsessed as a little kid. I was like, how do I make as much money as possible?” (Lucy Guo, via Simon Jack, 03:33)
• “She once bought and returned a plane ticket just to access an airport lounge for free.” (Zing Tsjeng, 35:24)
• “She recorded her reaction to the news, which was broken to her over text by a reporter from Forbes, being ‘lmao. But it’s all on paper.’” (Zing Tsjeng, 29:56)
• “It’s almost a requirement to drop out… Gates, Elon Musk... Zuckerberg. It’s a long list.” (Simon Jack, 10:52)
• "There’s a really long history of technology using humans and claiming that it’s just technology." (Zing Tsjeng, 28:13)
• Regarding splurging on private jets: “It’s really nice. I’ve done it a few times. I’ve, like, splurged a few times. Like, you know, when your flight’s delayed five hours, you’re just like, man, it would be really nice to own a PJ.” (Lucy Guo quoted by Simon Jack, 34:11)

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Conclusion & Listener Engagement

Simon and Zing wrap by inviting listeners to judge Lucy Guo: Good, bad, or just another billionaire?
Contact: [e-mail] or WhatsApp/Text [phone].

Teaser: Next episode will feature Ben Francis, Britain’s youngest billionaire and founder of Gymshark.

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For Listeners: What Makes Lucy Guo Stand Out?

• Daring dropout with an obsessive focus on money and self-driven achievement.
• Pioneered essential (if invisible) labor in AI’s global rise—yet controversy shadows her corporate legacy.
• Flaunts thrift even at billionaire status; mixes extravagance with dollar-store cunning.
• Still a work in progress—youth, lawsuits, and changing ambitions leave the question open.

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[End of Summary]

Transcript

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[Simon Jack]

It's a warm spring day in San Francisco, 2014 and it's a 19 year.

[Zing Seng]

Old student, exhausted but buzzing with adrenaline, steps outside an office building looking for a quiet place to make a call.

[Simon Jack]

She's just been accepted into the Thiel Fellowship, a golden ticket for tech entrepreneurs. But there's a catch. She has to drop out of college.

[Zing Seng]

She calls her parents expecting cheers, but she gets a blunt verdict instead. You're an idiot. For her parents, who had sacrificed everything, quitting school feels like a slap in the face.

[Simon Jack]

She knows what they'll say. No more health insurance, no more phone bills paid. No more financial lifeline. But she bets on herself anyway. A gamble that will one day lead to AI Billions.

[Zing Seng]

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.

[Simon Jack]

We take them from zero to their first million and then from a million onto a billion.

[Zing Seng]

My name is Zing Seng and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

[Simon Jack]

And I'm Simon Jack. I'm the BBC's business editor.

[Zing Seng]

And today we're talking about Lucy Guo, who in 2025 was named by Forbes as the youngest self made female billionaire at just 30 years old. Also, although she's recently been overtaken by.

[Simon Jack]

A younger billionaire, she made a fortune from her stake in Scale AI. This is an artificial intelligence company she co founded when she was just 21.

[Zing Seng]

Now scale AI might not be a household name, but it powers giants like OpenAI's, ChatGPT, Google, Microsoft, even General Motors self driving cars.

[Simon Jack]

And today she is worth $1.3 billion. But you wouldn't know it from her lifestyle.

[Zing Seng]

She skateboards to work. She still hunts for buy one, get one free deals. And her motto is buying act broke, stay rich.

[Simon Jack]

I act broke, but I'm not rich. But for now, let's scale back to zero and debug. If you like how Lucy Guo coded her way to that first million. Lucy Guo was born in the Bay Area of California. It's Northern California on October 14, 1994. Her parents were both electrical engineers who had emigrated to the US from China. She said her parents worked hard to climb from middle class to upper middle class, but both were laid off from their jobs briefly when she was young. So despite their success, they lived below their means often and instilled this into Lucy and her younger brother. Sometimes this frugality was too much. Guo said she was bullied at school for wearing plain, inexpensive clothes instead of trendy branded clothing. Yet it did give her the drive to make money. She told the BBC, I basically became obsessed as a little kid. I was like, how do I make as much money as possible?

[Zing Seng]

She's not the first billionaire to become obsessed with money. When she was a little kid, like many of our entrepreneurs, she mowed lawns, she sold things to her classmates. This included colored pencils and Pokemon cards. Must have made her very popular in school. Sometimes this got her sent to the principal's office. She'd hide the cash she made in her room, but it would often disappear. Her parents knew that the best way to discipline her was to take away her money. Now, Guo understandably wanted to keep that cash. So she went to a local Home Depot store and managed to get a Visa debit card to set up her own PayPal account. This was, according to Guo, when she was just 8 or 9 years old. I really struggle to think of an 8 or 9 year old right now. Who would know what PayPal even is?

[Simon Jack]

Or getting a Visa debit card.

[Zing Seng]

I mean, having said that, she has repeated this kind of origin story for her wealth over time. And I think in one case she says that she claims she sold the Pokemon cards in kindergarten.

[Simon Jack]

Right.

[Zing Seng]

Which would make her a very mathematically advanced child.

[Simon Jack]

Let's have a look at her early background. Her parents were pushing academic excellence. Her brother Skipped grades, accelerated through school. Lucy was signed up for an abacus competition. And she told cnbc, because I wasn't really cool or allowed to be social, I pretty much spent all my time on computers. Growing up, the only fun I would have was on a computer. At one point, Lucy's parents put a keylogger on her computer. This is a program that kind of tracks your keystrokes so you know what people are up to on their computer. But that motivated Lucy to learn more about computing. At age 9, she worked out how to get the keylogger off her computer.

[Zing Seng]

Soon she started playing online games such as Neopets, which is where users can care for virtual pets. It was really big at the time. I was an old Neopet fan. Really? Oh, yeah, yeah. And this, I think, is actually quite genius.

[Simon Jack]

Is this like the digital version of Tamagot or whatever?

[Zing Seng]

Exactly. But the difference is you're playing with other people in an ecosystem with money, or Neo Points, as it's called, the in game currency. So sometimes you can get these people who are trading Neo points for actual money on third party sites. So basically what Lucy did was teach herself to code these bots to automate the tasks and games so you could earn more Neo points. And then she would rack up lots of these points and then sell the account, sometimes for thousands of dollars. And I must admit, this blew my mind because I was dutifully playing those games like a sucker and not making any money from it. And here comes a billionaire who makes thousands from it. I mean, it really does kind of stagger you.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. Oh, well. In high school, she continued to work on those coding skills. She learned Photoshop so she could build websites to host adverts which could earn money through Google Adsense. She told Business Insider. I remember I go to Fry's Electronics, kind of high street store and just sit and read books there all day on how to do HTML and css. These are coding languages. And by the end of school, she claims she was earning nearly five figures. What is that, $10,000?

[Zing Seng]

Yeah, easy. She also says she made and lost her first $1 million in high school. In an interview with Fortune, Lucy recalled how she bought around $5,000 worth of Bitcoin during high school from money she'd made on the Internet. The bitcoin she bought, she said, was theoretically worth several million, but she left it on the exchange and never put it in her wallet. So she didn't actually make that first million.

[Simon Jack]

Do you know what the Internet is replete with stories about people who forgot to take. You know, lost a phone with coin on it. You know, in the early days, there was one guy who spent like 100 bitcoin on a couple of pizzas, which would be worth hundreds of millions.

[Zing Seng]

Lily Allen, the singer, famously turned down payment for a private gig in the form of bitcoin.

[Simon Jack]

Right. And funnily enough, my brothers tell me that the pizza day comes around every year and all the bitcoin bros celebrate this because that was basically the world's most expensive ever pizza.

[Zing Seng]

Well, I hope it was worth it.

[Simon Jack]

Let's look at where Guo was at the time. She went to high school in the late 2000s, early 2010s in Fremont, which is across the bay from Silicon Valley, sometimes referred to this area as the hardware side of the bay, where the factories companies including Apple and Tesla, who actually make sort of, you know, things rather than software are based. Bitcoin was invented in 2008 and it first traded for cash in 2010. Probably didn't hit the mainstream till a bit later, but, you know, growing up in a tech literate community like Fremont meant she could well have been an early adopter.

[Zing Seng]

Now, worth noting, you don't need to be a coder to actually get bitcoin. But her coding skills would have made it easier to mine to secure to experiment with the cryptocurrency. In 2011, it was ranging in value between $5 to $30. So depending on the price when she purchased it, 5 grand would be worth between tens of millions to $100 million right now.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, I think a lot of people do their daydreaming. If only I'd spent $5,000 in Bitcoin in 2010.

[Zing Seng]

Evonia hadn't paid for a pepperoni pizza in 2010 with Bitcoin.

[Simon Jack]

So, you know, she's on the ground, she's around the, around the action in Fremont. And in 2012, Grove started a double major in computer sciences and human computer interactions. Interesting course at Carnegie Mellon, one of the top schools for computer science in America. And whilst there, she started competing and we've come across this word before, hackathons. And these are competitions where computer programmers try to code the best solution, often against the clock, to a specific problem. They can, some, they can last, you know, for a day or 48 hours. Prizes range from, you know, iPads. They give away some cash prizes as well, like $35,000 in some cases.

[Zing Seng]

Guo said she won a lot of iPads. But hackathons were also an introduction to the tech startup world, which was much more appealing than Just straight coding. She blogged in 2017. I got to experience the whole spectrum, product coding and design. It's where I realized cold was my tool to unleash creativity. But I loved product the most. And her hackathon prowess also piqued the interest of the Peter Thiel Fellowship team. Now, Peter Thiel, one of our billionaires. You can go back and listen to our episode on him. The Thiel Fellowship was founded in 2011. It's a two year mentoring scheme. And back then it was awarding 20 people under 22 years of age, $100,000 scholarship, which is now worth 200 grand, to build their own business.

[Simon Jack]

But there's a very important and interesting catch to this fellow could only be accepted into the program if they agreed to drop out of university. So in 2014, age 19, Guo did just that. Dropped out of university and joined the program. She was selected from a pool of applicants from 44 different countries. But that came with a family cost.

[Zing Seng]

Oh yes, definitely. Now, dropping out of university caused a huge rift of the parents. They wanted her to pursue traditional education. And this is exactly where we found her at the start of this episode. These days, Lucy says she understands that her choice was taken as a sign of disrespect from her parents. She told CNBC in 2025, I think my parents viewed that as a sign that I didn't love them. And they weren't very happy with it when it was just me making a bet on myself and choosing to optimize for what I thought would be a better future for myself.

[Simon Jack]

I mean, how many of our Internet and tech billionaires dropped out of university? I would say at least half. More than half.

[Zing Seng]

I would say the majority.

[Simon Jack]

It's almost kind of requirement to drop out. Gates, Elon Musk, you know, it's a long list.

[Zing Seng]

Zuckerberg.

[Simon Jack]

Zuckerberg.

[Zing Seng]

I mean, it's almost like if you don't drop out of university to pursue a tech dream, you're sort of several years behind.

[Simon Jack]

Well, also I think that the community sees you as an establishment cautious person and that's not the qualities they look for. They want someone who's in a way a bit punk about stuff like edgy, radical. Edgy, radical. Two fingers up to the establishment. I don't need to go through these hoops that everyone else goes through.

[Zing Seng]

I don't need to get my diploma or graduate or shake anyone's hand to do my own thing.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, so Guo had some business ideas, but some of them were pretty short lived. She had an app called nomit which was a homemade food delivery app. Bit like Doordash or Deliveroo, but homemade. She quickly realized there would be a litany of legal issues, including liability, in case she poisons anyone. But that failure made her realize she still had a lot to learn. So she sought out work experience at some successful startups.

[Zing Seng]

She'd already been a summer intern on Facebook's iOS messenger team and an endless mobile while at college. But her first full time job was as a product designer at Quora. Now this is a question and answer discussion platform founded by a Facebook alumnus. Less than a year later, she took a job at Snapchat, which is founded by another of our billionaires, Evan Spiegel. And at Snapchat, she was the first ever female product designer. And she worked on projects like Localized Stories, which is kind of similar to Snap Maps, where you can see where your followers are.

[Simon Jack]

Right, okay. So she's getting a good smattering of experience. And in 2016, after two years as employee, she quits her day job to work on ideas for a new startup with someone called Alexander Wang, a maths prodigy she'd met when they were both working at Quora. When they started, she was 21, he was 19, and of course, he quit his degree at MIT. Now, their first idea was a subscription service for access to nightclubs, which Grohe said was a terrible idea. Her words. The people who went to nightclubs regularly knew how to get into the best ones already. So within weeks, they moved on to a healthcare app called Ava that would match patients to doctors. And that was inspired by Lucy's own experiences after breaking her jaw in an electric skateboard accent, of course. How very Californian.

[Zing Seng]

Something I find so interesting about tech billionaires is that they aren't really guided by specific interest. You know what I mean? You know, she's just interested in setting up businesses.

[Simon Jack]

Well, yeah, she's just kind of trying anything. Just sort of sticking her finger in the air and see which ways the wind's blowing and see whether, I suppose, you know, you throw enough mud at a wall and you hope that some of it sticks.

[Zing Seng]

Well, Guo and Wang used that health care app idea to apply for a startup accelerator called Y combinator for the 2016 summer intake. Now, why Combinator?

[Simon Jack]

Before, haven't we.

[Zing Seng]

I mean, it's kind of huge in the tech world. You know, it's run by another one of our billionaires, Sam Altman, who's now the CEO of OpenAI. And it's kind of like getting into the Oxbridge of startup accelerator. Funds, right.

[Simon Jack]

It's like sort of the finishing school. Basically. You get picked, like that's a good idea. Here's some money, here's some expertise. Here are some ideas, I suppose what they would call it an accelerator, wouldn't they? It's kind of a melting pot. But importantly, it's a melting pot that also comes with cash to start the businesses and concede them. So it's not just theoretical. There's real hard money available for those people who, you know, rise to the top of that program.

[Zing Seng]

Interestingly, after they joined the scheme, Goy and Wang realized their healthcare app was actually flawed. They wouldn't have enough return customers. Elderly patients would struggle to use it, so they had to leave that one behind as well.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, so while sleeping, sleeping on air mattresses in the Y Combinator shared house in Silicon Valley, I can see this picture quite clearly in my mind. They searched for some new ideas and a roommate suggested API for humans. Now, API is an important acronym in the tech world. It means application Programming interface. And it basically lets different software applications talk to each other. And the idea of an API for humans meant treating human tasks as if they could be requested and executed. Like if you like software commands, some would see that as dehumaniz. So for example, you could ask for a real world task, like identifying something in an image through a simple software command, and a human on the other end would complete it as if they were part of the code, as if they were part of the program. So in a way, it's a bit like thinking. You know, when TV people used to think there were little people inside of it. It's basically you're putting questions into a computer, thinking the computer's answering, but in fact, you've got little humans beavering away trying to help with the answer to this request. So in a way, it's qu. Quite non digital in its own way.

[Zing Seng]

Yeah, it's sort of like what producers do on radio really. You know, when the DJ is like, well, play the next song. It's not a little magic spell to make the next song come on. It's actually a producer doing the hard work of pressing the buttons like ours does.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, so the line between computers and humans really quite blurred in this example, which I find quite interesting.

[Zing Seng]

Exactly.

[Simon Jack]

Because on demand human work wasn't new.

[Zing Seng]

No, it wasn't. So companies like Google, Facebook and Quora, where both Wang and Guo had worked already used large in house teams of workers for tasks like content moder, like scanning through what people have been uploading to take down things that violate the terms and conditions. And there was also Mechanical Turk, which is Amazon's marketplace for hiring people to do jobs that computers struggle with, like writing product descriptions or identifying images. So Go and Wang could see that more companies than just these online giants were using AI for things like chatbots, and they needed humans to train these chatbots and AI programs.

[Simon Jack]

Got it. Okay. So in June 2016, Wang and Guo launched something called Scale AI. And in the first few days, Guo was responding to some of the API requests herself. But the Wall Street Journal reported that she recruited some of Scale's first contractors by joining remote work groups in the Philippines on Facebook, by sharing a quiz that she created. And Scale soon recruited hundreds of contractors this way through these online chat groups, mostly, as I say, in the Philippines.

[Zing Seng]

We don't know why Guo chose the Philippines, but it was probably because by 2016 it was already one of the world's major destinations for outsourced digital work for tech companies. Now this is thanks largely to its big population of English speaking, Internet savvy workers. That makes recruitment of data labeling freelancers scalable, so you can hire people en masse and also relatively inexpensive compared to labor markets in the West. She also probably picked Facebook groups because by that time many Filipinos were using Facebook as their primary online platform for connecting with others and for information and job searching.

[Simon Jack]

It's a bit like how Europe used, and the UK in particular used India as an outsourcing again, quite computer literate, English speaking, well educated workforce who were prepared to work for less. And with the UK and India, there was a historical relationship as there was between the Philippines and the us. So to get clients, Guo and Wang Mass emailed every company involved with Y Combinator, which at that time was 1400 companies. In that little ecosystem, Scale AI claimed they were different to existing competitor Mechanical Turk, the Amazon product. As they vetted their workers and they also spotted the need for labeling footage, for self driving cars, so identifying vehicles, whether it's a pedestrian, a cyclist, a cyclist pushing a bike, a cyclist on a bike, these little distinctions that computers found it hard to do. They would use a human to be able to tell the one thing from the other and as you say, train the AI to notice that difference. So you know, Uber Technologies, for example, became a client. They added Procter and Gamble, Google's holding company Alphabet. So they're getting some blue chip customers.

[Zing Seng]

What I find interesting about the great AI revolution, or whatever you want to call it, is that a lot of people, I think, you know, regular people like you know, my mum, for instance, uses ChatGPT might think of AI as just a sort of magical spell that, you know, the computer just knows exactly what's going on and what to do. But actually it's just a lot of it is powered by humans training these AI programs.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, certainly in the early days and now it trains itself in many ways by sort of harvesting lots of data and. But you know, in the early days that was definitely true, but now we get to the point where it's. We start turning this into a real and real money.

[Zing Seng]

Yep, exactly. The Y Combinator Fellowship clearly was really useful for Guob. It opened doors, you know, it gave her a kind of seal of approval. In July 2017, Scale AI announced their Series A funding of 4 and a half million dollars from investors including Axel Partners, Y Combinator and Arena Ventures. According to Bloomberg sources, Accel, which led the round, reportedly took a 25% stake and it valued scale AI at $15 million. Now, we don't know Guo's exact stake at this point, but she's co founder, so it's likely she had a considerable stake in the company. So late 2017 is a good place to say Lucy Guo is a millionaire.

[Simon Jack]

But she didn't start spending that cash immediately. In fact, taking a leaf out of her parents book, she lived an extremely frugal lifestyle until she hit the $10 million mark a few years later. Back to our thing about the fact we'd have been out long before that.

[Zing Seng]

I know I've been on a super yacht by now.

[Simon Jack]

Exactly, she said. Through her early 20s, she continued to couch surf and get free food from venture capital app.

[Zing Seng]

I'm sorry, but if my millionaire friend texted me and said, hey, I'm in town, can I sleep on your couch? I'd say I'm not putting you up on my sofa, you're a millionaire.

[Simon Jack]

Let's take her then from a million to a billion.

[Zing Seng]

In November 2017, Guo, then aged 23 and Wang aged 20, made the full Forbes 30 under 30 list. Startup founders want to be on this list. It is not a guarantee of long term success by any means, but it's prestigious. Everyone knows what the Forbes 30 under 30 list is. It can also crucially boost your reputation and lead to networking opportunities and fundraising opportunities.

[Simon Jack]

It's quite a big deal. The 30 under 30. I know people kill to be on that list. But while they're smiling in the photos, the relationship between Guo and Wang, who was the company's CEO at this time, was beginning to source Guo told time magazine in 2025, they clashed over various ways the company was being run, including the late payment of contract workers. For example, Scale AI had long used those remote workers we talked about in the Philippines. By 2017, the company was hiring through third party platforms like RemoteTasks, and this subsidiary company has since been the subject itself of media and labor rights reporting concerning pay and working conditions. So it was not uncontroversial using this third party platform.

[Zing Seng]

The differences of opinions between the co founders eventually hit a breaking point. It resulted in lucy leaving Scale AI in 2018, just two years after the company was started. The New York Times says she was fired. Other sources say she'd left. Guo told the Aspire with Emma gidd podcast in 2025 that she was already planning to leave when things started going south, but that she did feel betrayed at the end of the experience. She added that she believes the situation might have ended differently if Alexander wasn't the CEO. Now, Wang has declined to speak about the split, but when Guo left the company, she held onto an equity stake in scale AI, which is estimated to be around 5 or 6%, or around 47 million Class A shares.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, so that's key because that's the key source. We'll see to her. Well, a year after leaving, Guo's life on social media looks like a lot of fun. Rounds of partying, traveling, skydiving. She actually has a skydiving a license, which means she can jump without an instructor. In 2019, Guo founded a venture capital firm called Backend Capital. That firm raised 8 million for its first fund, 40 million for its second fund, and they made early stage investments in a bunch of startups, some of which reached the coveted unicorn status. Whether we've used a lot on this podcast, that means a company worth over a billion dollars. In a way, it's quite a predictable move. You've had some success. Scaleye is recognized. You've been through the Peter Thiel and Sam Altman kind of factory. So you've got their kite mark of approval, their stamp of approval that gives you some clout to be able to go and raise money to invest in other ideas. Because if you had that good one, maybe you'll have some other good ones and investors can trust you to know which ones are good and which ones are bad.

[Zing Seng]

It's funny that there seems to be such a route to gaining approval and kind of a thumbs up from the stock world. Yeah, even though all of these people are supposedly edgy radicals who dropped out of Stanford and mit, there is still that well, trodden path to success.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, yeah. You've got to burnish your credentials with a slightly different kind of establishment than that one. So she's out there raising a fund to invest in other companies.

[Zing Seng]

Yeah. And remember she's only 25 years old at this point.

[Simon Jack]

And how irritating.

[Zing Seng]

I know, how deeply irritating for both of us. One of her best investments has actually been a fintech company called ramp, because in 2020 backend invested six figures and ramp was most recently valued at 32 billion. So while we don't know the exact figure of that investment, it's likely to be worth tens of millions of dollars and growing. She also co founded her own startup, incubator called hfo, which is a three month program where a group of founders live together in a house in America and focus on building their company. So she's kind of almost making kind of Peter Teal esque moves.

[Podcast Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Simon Jack]

So while traveling the world, working with these startups and attending festivals, along the way, she made a lot of online creators, you know, influencers, celebrities, etc, who shared frustrations about their income. They didn't think they were getting enough money. Most make their money from brand deals. Often inconsistent, they're easily lost. So in 2022 she launched something called Passes, a subscription based, sort of direct to fan platform. And it lets creators earn money from their audience. A bit like Patreon with one off payments as well as subscription. A bit like OnlyFans without the adult content bit of that, but allowing people, people doing stuff online to collect more of the money from the attention economy which they're developing.

[Zing Seng]

Yeah. And you know that economy is booming. So the creator economy is expected to hit hundreds of billions of dollars in the next few years. The difference between things like Patreon or OnlyFans is that the creators and passes keep about 90% of their subscription revenue. The company takes 10% plus $0.30 per transaction. She wants it to be the platform that mints the first ever creator unicorn. And that's the first content creator to be worth a billion dollars.

[Simon Jack]

But Grow's creator platform, Passes, has faced some legal challenges.

[Zing Seng]

Yeah, so there's a rival app called FanFics. And in January 2024 they sued Parses alleging the theft of confidential information and misleading payout claims. Lucy dismissed the allegation saying, I think it's a one sided beef. Like it's not true. We got no trade secrets. They lost every motion they filed. She denied that passers was losing money and said the company was profitable at the time. At the time of recording the case remains active. And More seriously, in February 2025, Parcis was hit with a class action lawsuit alleging the distribution of child sexual abuse material. Claims that go overrode safety controls for underage creators, which was anyone under the age of 18. A Passes spokesperson said there's no record or recollection of Lucy Guo ever interacting with a plaintiff. There's no evidence in the complaint that links Passes or our founder to this prohibited activity. Passes does not allow nudity whatsoever and at the time of recording this case is still ongoing.

[Simon Jack]

Right, so let's take a moment to check in with what's going on back at Scale AI Whilst Guo was running her venture capital firm and all her other projects, a year after she left, Scale AI became a unicorn. That means worth a billion dollars thanks to a $100 million investment from, yep, you guessed it, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. By 2021, Scale AI had expanded beyond this sort of data labeling of images and sensor data for self driving cars to starting to help companies like E. PayPal Square Big payments company to organize customer data for these early AI and chatbot systems so they know what they're looking at. And in 2022 scale AI was awarded a US Department of Defense contract worth 249 million so quarter of a billion dollars to support the military's AI projects, including using that technology to analyze satellite imagery in Ukraine for example. So some real world applications.

[Zing Seng]

Now it's worth talking about the impact and scope of of Scale AI. So Scale utilized human workers all over the world to solve one of the bottlenecks in AI development, which is the need for accurate data sets. Without companies like Scale, progress in autonomous vehicles voice assistants would have been much slower.

[Simon Jack]

But it hasn't all been smooth sailing for scale. In 2023, for example, New York magazine highlighted the hidden human labor behind AI. Just what we've been talking about, showing that companies like Scale AI rely on thousands of low paid, closely monitored annotators, raising concerns about working conditions, pay transparency and the same year 2023, some reporting by the Washington Post highlighted troubling labor practices on scale AI's remotasks remember that name platform including accounts and workers have drastically reduced pay and delayed all missing payments. So you know, workers quoted in these articles said their pay per job went from dollars to cents and pay would often be late or not arrival at all. Scale AI said at that time they were continually improving and delays or interruptions to payments are exceedingly rare, was their comment.

[Zing Seng]

There's a really long history of technology using Humans and claiming that it's just technology. Actually, did you know that in the first instance of the word computer, computers were actually used to refer to people? So in the 19th and 20th century, when you talked about a computer, you were actually talking about a person sitting down with pen and paper working, or the cell phone.

[Simon Jack]

I've got this image of someone sitting at an early computer and typing in something and then flashing to a room full of people scurrying out going, oh my God, look, they want to know this. Does anyone know the answer? You know, that combination of human whatever and the front end, it all looks really automated and sort of seamless, but actually there's some human capital going on the other end.

[Zing Seng]

Well, this is the big conversation happening now, right? Is this the kind of invisible backbone of all technology or is this true just exploitation and people are able to put a kind of marketing and PR face on it and say, oh, our AI is so sophisticated, when really it's being run by dozens, hundreds of people in underdeveloped countries who are getting paid very little money.

[Simon Jack]

In 2024, AI adoption surged. It went from being something that people will wang on at conferences like Davos for like 20 years and suddenly, holy cow, it's actually here. So in 2024, Scale AI raised a billion dollars at a 14 billion dol. Scale AI partnered with OpenAI to help customers fine tune GPT 3.5 models for their own applications and build them into their own applications. In April 2025, Forbes reported that Scale AI's value was around 25 billion, which implies that Lucy Guo's stake, Remember she's got 6%, is worth over a billion. Finally crowning her as the youngest self made female billionaire.

[Zing Seng]

Yeah, she record her reaction to the news, which was broken to her over text by a reporter from Forbes being lmao. But it's all on paper, right? Meaning that it's not money in the bank, it's just all on paper.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, lmao. I'm sure you know what it is and I won't have to translate that for you.

[Zing Seng]

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[Simon Jack]

So there she is. She's a billionaire. She is the youngest self made female billionaire. Let us see where she goes beyond that billion now.

[Zing Seng]

Meta bought a 49% stake in Scale AI for 15 billion, which is its largest deal since WhatsApp that boosted its value to 29% billion. But Lucy isn't rushing to sell her shares. She'd rather take a loan against investments than accept a steep discount.

[Simon Jack]

And that's quite common. So basically you've got all this money on paper, but it's not in your bank account, it's in shares which are on exchange or whatever. And. And so where. How do you get at your money? What has happened is that, and this. This has been going on for a long time. Banks will lend you money secured against your stake in the company. They won't lend you 100% of what your stake is worth. But if she needed $200 million, she could probably get it by ple. Her scale AI shares as collateral. So that's quite a common thing. And in fact, banks are beginning to do that with people's bitcoin holdings. So rather than take money out of bitcoin, they'll lend you money against your bitcoin holdings. So it's quite clever way of financial engineering to get cash to people who've got, on paper, loads of money.

[Zing Seng]

Interesting. I mean, she's joked that the one thing that's nearly convinced her to liquidate that wealth is actually flying private jets.

[Simon Jack]

Yes. Yeah. She said, it's really nice. I've done it a few times. I've, like, splurged a few times. Like, you know, when your flight's delayed five hours, you're just like, man, it would be really nice to own a pj.

[Zing Seng]

PJ is one of those terms that only the truly rich use because for the rest of us, it just means pajamas.

[Simon Jack]

Pajamas. For them, it means private jet. If you're a fan of the series Succession, you'll hear them talking about the PJs. And Kieran Culkin character. Roman gets very annoyed when they think the shareholders want to take away their PJs. No, man, the PJs gotta stay.

[Zing Seng]

Well, she clearly has a lot of money and she likes to spend it.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Simon Jack]

She owns homes in Miami, Las Vegas, Louisiana, big parties. Once hosted a party with 100 guests, a lemur and a snake in her Miami building where David Beckham had lived. She earning her homeowners association fines for her unruly behavior. She also created something called Lucy Palooza, a loose derivation of Lollapalooza, which is a famous festival. Hers is an annual festival with perks like free Botox and tattoos, really. But does claim she turns a profit through the sponsorships she gets for those events.

[Zing Seng]

Presumably you wouldn't be getting Botox and a tattoo at the same time. That seems like a little bit of a.

[Simon Jack]

You definitely want separate. You definitely want different needles.

[Zing Seng]

Well, despite all this, she still drives a Honda Civic. She shops at Shein. This is a very cheap online high street store. It's not designer fashion by any means. She once bought and returned a plane ticket just to access an airport lounge for free. Fleet.

[Simon Jack]

I like that move. I think that's. So she goes and buys the ticket, which tells her to use the executive lounge, finishes the food, goes back and then gets a refund for a ticket and goes on.

[Zing Seng]

I mean, it's pretty ingenious.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Zing Seng]

When she travels, as we said, she prefers to couch surf at friends homes and book hotels. She said, in her defense, I like spending time with people. It's nice. It's so depressing. After a day of meetings, going back to my hotel room and being alone.

[Simon Jack]

I can only hope that the people she stays with feel exactly the same way about this.

[Zing Seng]

Well, now we've learned all about Lucy Guo, it's time to score her.

[Simon Jack]

Right? So this is the bit where we look at Lucy Guo and all our billionaires through the lens of a few categories and we score them just for fun, out of naught to 10 things like wealth, controversy, giving back the philanthropy, power and legacy, things like that, before handing it over to you to decide whether you think they're good, bad, or just another billionaire. So let us start as we always do, with wealth. Now, at $1.3 billion, she's creeping in at entry level, but we look at other factors as well.

[Zing Seng]

Exactly. We look at spending. She did spend 30 million on an LA mansion. She does say she'll always take a freebie from a hotel room, even if she doesn't need it. I mean, same Lucy.

[Simon Jack]

Is there anything more annoying than a tight billionaire?

[Zing Seng]

This is true. But I mean, she did create her own music festival.

[Simon Jack]

Okay.

[Zing Seng]

With her friends.

[Simon Jack]

Well, fair enough. Also, we look at how far they've come. Rags to riches, for example. Some people came from absolute dirt poverty to multi billions. Like people like Oprah, for example. What do we think about Lucy on this one?

[Zing Seng]

Well, her parents were upper middle class electrical engineers. She was raised frugally. But you know, all her money's essentially been self made.

[Simon Jack]

I'd like to know whether the parents still are angry with her for dropping out of college.

[Zing Seng]

Oh, I don't know. I would say that as someone who also comes from Chinese heritage where education is very important, I think my parents would have disowned me if I dropped out of university.

[Simon Jack]

Really?

[Zing Seng]

Oh, yeah.

[Simon Jack]

Even if you became a billionaire, wouldn't they welcome you back with economics?

[Zing Seng]

I think they would always hold onto it somehow. I bet.

[Simon Jack]

Comes up, they've nursed that grievance for decades, I bet.

[Zing Seng]

And maybe Lucy, if you're listening to this, you can let me know. I bet it comes up during Lunar New year dinners or Mr. And Mrs.

[Simon Jack]

Guo, you know, have you let go of this yet? Let us know. A good bad billionaire. Okay, so wealth, I'm just gonna give her, you know, it's not rags to riches, it's not that much money. I know it's a stupid amount of money, but by our standard it's not that much and she doesn't spend it like some we've seen. So I'm gonna give her, I think a two.

[Zing Seng]

Oh, well, I feel like I have to give her slightly higher because she was the youngest self made female billionaire when she made her money, which I think puts her at at least a seven out of ten for me.

[Simon Jack]

Wow, okay, you've nudged me up to three, but that's a big difference in our scoring. Three for me, seven for you. Controversy contro. See quite a lot of lawsuits knocking about.

[Zing Seng]

Yeah, well, you know, at the time of recording the class action lawsuit that's still ongoing, there's all this controversy at Scale AI, although she's not in charge right now of how it's being run. You know, I think, I think she scores kind of middling for the, for me, I mean, the cases, a lot of the cases are still ongoing, so it's hard to say.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, I mean there's always this case, isn't there, with these kind of platforms that even the biggest ones struggle to police some of the content on them. And some people say that's a very bad thing and they should spend some of their vast fortunes in doing a better job on that. But when you have big digital platforms, monitoring what goes on in them is a constant challenge, I would say.

[Zing Seng]

Yeah. And some of the biggest companies in the world still haven't gotten a handle on it.

[Simon Jack]

I'm going to say five for controversy.

[Zing Seng]

Straight down the middle.

[Simon Jack]

Straight down the middle.

[Zing Seng]

I think, I think it's also a five for me because it doesn't seem like these aren't problems that are unique to passes or Scale AI. I think you'd see them, as you said, with every large tech company.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, so five for each on controversy, philanthropy. How much is she given back?

[Zing Seng]

Well, she's not signed the Giving Pledge, which is a very famous pledge that billionaires sign up to give away their wealth in their lifetime. It's also hard to find any kind of publicly documented philanthropy on her part.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, but bear in mind her wealth still comes from her shareholding in Scale AI, which she hasn't cashed in. So in a way, she doesn't have that much liquid money to, you know, in create endowments and all that kind of stuff. It's not in a Gates kind of situation. She says she wants to focus on tackling human trafficking. She inspired by the plight of some children she saw on trips to China with her parents. So for me, this is a, you know, this is a work in progress. So I'm gonna give a three for this. Two, in fact.

[Zing Seng]

Oh, I think I'm gonna. I was gonna say three felt generous to me because I was gonna give her a two. But, you know, she's young. She's still got time to give.

[Simon Jack]

Plenty of time to give money away. You go for it, Lucy. So power and legacy impact on the industry. This is interesting. Cause this is not somebody who had a burning vision of what they wanted to do with their in technology. She tried a bunch of other things first, you know, nightclub app. What was the other one? A food delivery business. And then finally hit the jackpot with scale AI.

[Zing Seng]

And arguably, if she hadn't done it, someone else would have created something like scale AI.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, because that someone needed to help the early AI models learn the difference between things that it was confused by. But it's been an important part of the food chain in getting us the position in AI where we are today. I'm not going to give a massive score for this. I really reckon I'm going to give her a two.

[Zing Seng]

Oh, that is very low. I mean, I kind of feel like if your company ends up helping to create the technology that powers the Department of Defense says technology in Ukraine. I mean, it is kind of like the invisible hand behind a lot of other companies that we now associate very closely with AI.

[Simon Jack]

She's not a Peter Thiel kind of character, is she? She's nowhere near or in a musk kind of character. I think if, you know, if the teals and musks are scoring in the high single digits, then she's low. So I'm going to say two.

[Zing Seng]

But I think there must be something in her, and maybe this is a kind of time will tell situation. There must be something in her that has made Peter Thiel give her this fellowship, but also invest. So maybe I'll give her a 3 out of 10. She could still go places. As we've painfully pointed out multiple times during this podcast, for my own sanity, she is very young and she's got a long way to go.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, so what was it from you? I was a two and you were a Three. Okay, so that is where the Lucy Guo story ends for now. As you say, zing. So the question is, is she good, bad or just another billionaire? What do you think?

[Zing Seng]

Email goodbadbillionairebc.com or drop us a text on WhatsApp to 001-917-686-1176 and tell us what you think.

[Simon Jack]

And please don't forget to include your name. We may read out your message on a future episode.

[Zing Seng]

We are loving reading all your messages. So we've had some great feedback on Luciano Benetton.

[Simon Jack]

Brent from the USA says, I was a teenager in the living in Northern California and I was in love with the Benetton brand. I love the Formula one team and their ad campaigns were so beautiful and showed light to inequality and social issues as that was what the 80s was about. Funny because the Benetton stores didn't get to us and the first time I stepped foot into a shop was in Turkey when I was stationed there in the US Air Force. Benetton truly made me think of beautiful Italian things. Now I'm older, I have an Alfa Romeo and a Vespa and say Ciao ciao when driving them with my Ray Ban. Brilliant. Thanks a lot, Brent.

[Zing Seng]

Brent, you sound like a pretty cool guy. And we also have a return listener who says thanks for reading my Michael o' Leary comment out. I didn't realize you couldn't see my name. Duh. I'm Tony and I live in Malaga, Spain. Congratulations on your Benetton episode. Great storytelling. Even though Luciano pioneered fast fashion, bright merchandising and use of influencers, his troubling social role and investments in Italy make him just another billionaire. Thanks for sending another comment in, Tony.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, we also had another listener from Spain get in touch. This is Geronimo, born and raised in Barcelona and I remember very well the Benetton stores. They were the clothes for rich people, at least richer than my family. I remember their bright colours ads and the fact that we could not afford them. It's always fascinating to learn the origin story. I think Benetton is just another billionaire. Thank you very much Jeronima. Who do we have next ep?

[Zing Seng]

Well, we have Britain's youngest billionaire and that makes him part of the 12% of all billionaires worldwide under 50. A quite elite club.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. One of only four people under the age of 30 to have made themselves over a billion dollars and did it by sewing in a garage.

[Zing Seng]

That's right. It wasn't even his garage, it was his parents garage.

[Simon Jack]

Jim Bunny turned Billionaire this is the story of Ben Francis.

[Zing Seng]

Good Bad Billionaire is a BBC World Service podcast produced by Tamsin Curry. The researcher is Maria Noyen, the editor is Paul Smith and it's a BBC Studios production for the BBC World Service. The Senior Commissioning Producer is Sarah Green and the Commissioning Editor is John Minnell. RingCentral's AI receptionist uses Voice AI to answer on the first ring so you'll never miss a colleague again. In just a few minutes, you can personalize your own AI receptionist to answer questions, route calls, schedule appointments, and even send texts in multiple languages. Plus, it's easy to scale create unlimited AI receptionists across any phone system. It's all powered by one reliable platform for effortless AI communications. See for [e-mail] ringcentral voice of your Business.