It's 2012. In a ballet studio in Brazil, a teenage girl balances on the tip of one foot while stretching her other leg up to ear level. Beneath her raised thigh, a cigarette burns, almost close enough to burn her, but not touching her.

It is her teacher who holds the cigarette, waiting to see which will give first: the muscle or the girl's will. She doesn't hesitate.

That mix of discipline and stubbornness would lead her to become a multimillionaire a little over a decade later.

The teenager's name is BA Luana Lopes Lara and today, at 30 years old, she has a fortune of US$2.6 billion. She is the youngest billionaire in the world who has made her fortune on her own, without inheriting it, according to Forbes magazine.

Although he has kept his personal life largely private, what allowed him to amass such an amount of money has given him a lot to talk about.

She co-founded a platform called Kalshi that is at the forefront of a business that many call betting but that she prefers to describe as another form of trading, that is, buying and selling assets, like that carried out in the stock markets.

In its case, it's a prediction market that allows anyone to speculate on any real-world event, from how much snow will fall during a storm to who will win in the upcoming US presidential election.

Lopes Lara devised an amalgamation of Wall Street and Las Vegas: the entire world is a casino in which we can all be players.

And that has moved tens of billions of dollars in transactions, as well as generated a lot of controversy.

Because? Let's go to the beginning to find out.

From tutu to MIT

Before finance and Kalshi, Lopes Lara was at the Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil, the only headquarters outside Russia of the famous company. There, as a teenager, he began his professional life, in a training program with days that ranged from academic classes in the morning to long ballet sessions at night.

“I practiced eight hours a day,” he told the BBC, recalling how much his joints, bones and muscles hurt, in “a very, very competitive environment.”

“In ballet there are few roles and very few companies you can dance with.”

Combining that physical pressure with psychological pressure at such a young age was hard, he admitted. But it also served as training for everything that would come later in his life.

"You learn that you can actually do a lot more than you think. And that kind of mindset is very important," he said.

As if the schedule were not already exhausting enough, Lopes Lara studied late into the night to compete in academic Olympiads: he took gold in the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and bronze in the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad.

After finishing high school she went to Salzburg, Austria, to dance professionally in a season of “Swan Lake.”

Nine months later, she decided to trade ballet shoes for books and move to the US to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The decision was not impulsive: she had known for a long time that ballet would not be, for her, the end point. “I loved it, but I always had very big ambitions, and I wanted to learn and build things outside of ballet too.”

At MIT he studied computer science and mathematics, and later gravitated toward statistics and quantitative finance.

According to her, the most valuable thing was not the classes, but the people she met. And among those people was Tarek Mansour, also a computer science student, born in California but raised in Lebanon.

They both interned on Wall Street, and one afternoon in 2018, while walking after work, she came up with the idea that would change both of their lives.

Everything that can be discussed is negotiable

Lopes Lara had been struck by the fact that in financial markets opinions about the future were almost always expressed indirectly, never directly.

“At the time, Brexit was very important, and everyone was calling Goldman and Bridgewater, where we worked, asking how they could find a way to express their opinions in the markets.”

These formulas were always indirect: short the pound sterling, buy this instrument, bet on that other, in an attempt to imitate what they actually wanted to predict.

What he came up with was “to create a place where you could operate directly on whether Brexit was going to happen or not.”

Mansour saw the potential immediately.

They decided to found a company and called it Kalshi (which in Arabic means “everything”).

The philosophy, in Mansour's words, was simple: financialize everything.

"The universe of what can be negotiated today versus what could be negotiated is tiny. Anything about which there is a difference of opinion can one day be traded," he said.

The underlying idea was easy to explain, although not so easy to assimilate.

“Prediction markets work like the stock market, but instead of trading with stocks, you trade with the outcome of future events,” summarized Lopes Lara.

Users speculate on the outcome of real events, from elections to inflation data, sports to Oscar winners.

They do this through what are called “event contracts”; The contract price reflects what the market believes is the probability of it occurring. When the event is resolved, the contract pays.

With that idea they went to Y Combinator, the Californian accelerator that promoted startups like Airbnb and Reddit, and presented it as “a stock exchange for events.”

One of the partners, Michael Seibel, decided to take a chance, and in 2019, Forbes magazine published the first article about Kalshi.

He stressed that much of what they intended to do was illegal.

From bets to contracts

Gambling laws in the US are a mosaic: each state decides what it allows and what it does not, since in 2019 the Supreme Court repealed the federal rule that almost completely prohibited it. Building a national business on that basis was a minefield.

Lopes Lara and Mansour's strategy consisted of not calling a spade a spade: Kalshi would not offer bets, but rather “event contracts.”

The legal nuance mattered because prediction markets were already regulated, but by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), under commodities law, not gambling law.

If they could get the CFTC to treat them as a financial exchange, they would no longer be subject to gambling restrictions.

Getting that federal license was not going to be easy. Regulators had been concerned about insider trading for decades.

The fear was not abstract: This year, for example, someone won $400,000 on a rival prediction market betting on the exact date Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would leave power, raising suspicions that the person had some direct link to the situation.

Kalshi's co-founders consulted more than 60 lawyers and all advised them to forget about the project: it had been attempted without success since the 1980s.

But they finally found the ideal person: Jeff Bandman, a lawyer and former CFTC official, who knew the organization inside out and agreed to lead its regulatory strategy.

In November 2020, after two years of back and forth, the CFTC chairman called them personally to give them the go-ahead.

Kalshi thus became the first federally regulated event contracts exchange in US history.

open doors

In July 2021 Kalshi opened its doors to the public, first only as a website. The beginnings were discreet, but little by little the contracts began to multiply.

In 2022, Forbes included Lopes Lara, aged 25, on its list of the most notable people under 30, although in that article the visible face was Mansour. By then the company already had an office in New York, 32 employees and was negotiating two million contracts per week.

In 2023, a single user surpassed $1 million in annual earnings operating on the platform.

That same year the next big leap was made, with the election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

The CFTC blocked Kalshi's contracts on those elections for looking too much like a bet.

Lopes Lara, against the advice of his own investors, sued the regulator, arguing that an election result “has consequences for everyone” and “plays an essential role in determining our collective future.”

In September 2024 he won the trial. Kalshi launched the first legal speculation about a US election in more than a century, and the app shot to the top of the App Store.

The phenomenon was repeated, on a smaller scale, in the race for mayor of New York in 2025. In the middle of the campaign, candidate Zohran Mamdani even cited Kalshi's odds, which at one point gave him a more than 90% chance of winning.

That a candidate uses the figures from a platform of this type as a campaign argument says a lot about how much weight these markets had gained in the public conversation.

For Lopes Lara, that is one of the reasons that drives her to move forward.

“The unbiased data you get about the state of an election is very important,” he told the BBC.

According to her, having access to that type of information - which, she indicated, has proven time and time again to be more accurate than traditional polls - is key "to a healthy democracy."

Maybe. What there is no doubt is that, with the door of politics open, the big money entered.

the game of life

In December 2025, Kalshi reached a valuation of US$11 billion. By then, Lopes Lara owned 12% of the company: about US$1.3 billion.

At 29, she became the youngest woman in the world to build such a fortune from scratch.

In March 2026, the company took its first step outside the United States, opening operations in Brazil, the country where it all began for it.

Growth has not silenced uncomfortable questions.

The first is obvious: is Kalshi a bookmaker in disguise?

The damage that gambling can cause is known.

Kalshi responds that it is heavily regulated, noting that it does not make money from its users' losses, but rather from a transaction fee.

"When you play in bookmakers or casinos and all that, you are betting against the house, and the house always wins. The game is rigged against you. We function as a fair market, just like the options markets and the futures markets," Lopes Lara told the BBC.

Another concern has to do with insider information. If someone knows something that the rest don't, they can take an unfair advantage from the system. The case of the soldier who made money betting on the exact date on which Maduro would leave power, and who today faces charges for it, illustrates the risk well.

The company says it explicitly prohibits insider trading and investigates any suspicious behavior.

And there are more and more concerns.

Is there a risk that economic interest will end up influencing the outcome of an event, rather than simply predicting it?

Kalshi argues the opposite: that having money at stake incentivizes people to become better informed and participate more in democratic life.

On the other hand, if Kalshi's vision, according to Mansour, is to “finance everything and create a tradable asset from any difference of opinion,” are there no limits?

Lopes Lara assured the BBC that the “lines that we are not going to cross have to do with violent activities: wars, terrorism, murders, those are things that we do not touch.”

However, the platform has touched on topics such as the possibility of famine in Gaza, how many people Donald Trump's government would deport that year and the fate of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, before his assassination.

“Basically, betting on almost anything has been legalized, making it very macabre,” said Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for the advocacy group Public Citizen.

Is a price being put on the tragedy?

Has public life become a game of chance?

The questions multiply, while on Kalshi and other similar platforms millions of users evaluate other, sometimes more playful ones, such as: Will Bad Bunny open his show with 'Tití Me Preguntó'? o Will the president of the Federal Reserve say the word 'cuts' 10 times in his speech?

Meanwhile, the former dancer continues to get rich. In May 2026 it was reported that Kalshi's co-founders had more than doubled their wealth in just six months.

“It has been very surreal,” said Lopes Lara. “To look back and think that I was a girl from Brazil who was passionate about ballet, who just had the dream of coming to the United States and building things… it's crazy to see this.”

This news has been tken from authentic news syndicates and agencies and only the wordings has been changed keeping the menaing intact. We have not done personal research yet and do not guarantee the complete genuinity and request you to verify from other sources too.