Luana Lopes Lara: Prediction market payout
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. K-Rauta. Auttaa alkuun ja eteenpäin.
Lapland Hotelsissa yövyt Suomen parhaaksi valitussa hotelliketjussa. Ja heräät palkitun aamiaisen äärelle. Nauti kesäöistä kaupunkihotelleissamme. Nyt joka kuudes yö maksutta.
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.
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.
We take them from zero to their first million and then from their million onto a billion.
I'm Simon Jack. I'm the BBC's business editor. And I'm Zing Zing, and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster. So our billionaire this episode is Luana Lopez-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.
Yep. Sorry, Lucy Goyle, 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.
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.
Kalshi is at the forefront of something that's been called gambling, but in her words, it's just another form of trading.
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.
Yeah, as Luana says, they'd look for events that have been ripped directly from the headlines. So, for instance, you go on to Kaoshi, you might be able to place a trade on how much snow will fall in New York during a particularly bad snowstorm.
Who will win the Winter Olympics men's hockey gold medal? What will be the price of a rare labubu doll? And, of course, who will win the next US presidential election?
You can think of Kaoshi as being like the love child between Wall Street and Vegas. So the whole world is a casino and everyone a player.
But crucially, in the United States, it is not actually considered gambling or betting.
Why? Well, let's travel back to the beginning to find out. You can bet it's going to be quite the story.
Luana Lopez Lara was born in 1996 in Brazil. As a child, she lived in various cities around the country, ending up as a teenager in Joinville. Her family was big on maths. Her mother was a maths teacher. Even her father was an actual 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.
Yes. But her first real passion was ballet.
How did Luana Lopes Lara transition from ballet to becoming a billionaire?
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. And this is the only branch outside of Russia of the celebrated, sometimes controversial, controversial Bolshoi ballet company. And the Brazilian school granted 100% 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 startup.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:10
2
How did Luana Lopes Lara transition from ballet to becoming a billionaire?
4:10–10:29
3
What is Kalshi and how does it differentiate between trading and gambling?
10:29–12:30
4
What events can you bet on with Kalshi's prediction market?
12:30–48:17