When Luana Lopes Lara saw a few weeks ago that Forbes had named her the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire—ahead of Taylor Swift!—she thought it was some kind of a joke.
“People come up with so much shit now that I assumed it was false,” Lopes Lara told me as she sipped sauvignon blanc in a wine bar in the West Village. “I’m a big Taylor fan, so any headline with my name and Taylor’s is like the craziest thing I’ve seen in my life.”
It was 5:30 p.m., an early hour to end the workday—except that Lopes Lara was planning to return to work after our meeting and not finish until 10, her usual schedule. That Lopes Lara would, at age 29, be in the exalted company of Taylor Swift was not exactly something that she had predicted. But as I listened to her explain her childhood, her current success made perfect sense. As a young girl in Brazil, she placed next to her bed a list of some of the people she hoped to emulate, including Winston Churchill, Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf, and Alexander the Great. “Since I was very little,” Lopes Lara said, “I was weirdly obsessive and ambitious.”
