How These Bold Women Are Reimagining Leadership

In 2023, Luana Lopes Lara—a former professional ballerina and MIT graduate who been a hedge fund trader at Citadel Securities—told her college friend and cofounder Tarek Mansour that they should sue the government. When they broke the news to their investors, every single one objected. It didn’t matter. By the end of the year, NYC-based prediction market Kalshi had sued the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, challenging the regulators who had rejected its request to let everyday users bet on the outcome of political elections. Months before the 2024 presidential election, Kalshi prevailed, becoming the first company to offer legal election contracts in the U.S. in over a century.

Lopes Lara’s conviction paid off big. The 2024 election became a watershed moment for prediction markets, vaulting a once-fringe experiment beloved of academics and crypto enthusiasts into the mainstream. Today, Kalshi chief operating officer Lopes Lara is the youngest self-made woman billionaire, running a company that is pulling in revenue at a rate of $1.5 billion annually, by letting users wager on the outcome of events across sports, pop culture, politics and more. She and Mansour—who each hold an estimated 12% stake in the Kalshi, which is now valued at $22 billion, are worth $2.6 billion each—both turned 30 last month, making them the youngest list makers on Forbes’ inaugural Iconoclast 50.

Lopes Lara is one of ten women to make Forbes Iconoclast 50. Half of the women game changers—like McKenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates—are being recognized for giving their money away—and making a big impact—some alongside their husbands. (Read about the Iconoclast 50 honorees’ philanthropic efforts here.) However in industries like technology and media and entertainment women are forging their own paths disrupting the status quo and piling up riches in the process. Billionaire Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX, is very much the hands-on power behind Elon Musk, driving the company towards an IPO that could value it at more than $1.5 trillion. Thirty six years ago, in 1990, when Forbes put Madonna on its cover, asking if she was “America’s Smartest Business Women?,” the pop star and her handlers wanted nothing to do with Forbes, the business magazine. Today stars like Taylor Swift and Beyonce Knowles are revered for their innovations and business savvy and aren’t shy about it.

If there is a superpower among Iconoclast 50 women, it is their attention to detail oriented and their mastery of multitask. At Kalshi’s Manhattan office, COO Lopes Lara and Mansour sit at desks directly across from each other amidst their employees. CEO Mansour, handles the company’s external life including media, investors, policy and high-level strategy. Lopes Lara, who describes herself as introverted and more disciplined and organized of the duo, runs the day-to-day. “I can do a lot of things, but not at 100%. He can do one thing at 100%,” she says, adding that on any given day she can be switching across engineering, design, marketing, market creation, customer support and legal.

It’s Lopes Lara who is holding down the fort, says Kalshi’s head of crypto, John Wang. “She’s like an orchestra conductor,” he adds, describing her knack for pulling the right people into the room at the right moment, making sure no one gets distracted and getting everyone on the same page. “It’s like she can juggle 100 balls at once and not drop a single one.”

For a company moving at breakneck speed, Lopes Lara is responsible for making sure nothing slows it down. For instance, when Kalshi had to rebuild the software that accepts and routes user payments, she drew up a plan and guided the engineering, product and design teams to finish in two days what would normally take weeks. “It was kind of amazing to watch,” says Wang. “She has this very no-BS mindset and a strong sense of urgency.”

Around 150 employees now report to Lopes Lara and Mansour, with Lopes Lara directly managing their daily output. “The heaviest day of the week for me is Sunday,” she says, noting that that’s when she sets the weekly goals each team must hit. Part of the job is guiding and pushing everyone harder. The other part is setting the tone for Kalshi’s rank and file. Sunday through Friday, she’s usually the first in the office and the last out, leaving close to midnight some nights.

Lopes Lara says she wants Kalshi to become the largest financial exchange in the world and its despite legal and regulatory challenges, many of the savviest players in finance agree. Vlad Tenev, founder and CEO of Robinhood, said on a February earnings call, “We’re just at the beginning of a prediction market supercycle that could drive trillions in annual volume over time.” (Robinhood began offering Kalshi’s prediction markets to its users in April 2025.) Jeff Yass’s Susquehanna International Group became Kalshi’s first market-maker and has long touted the case for prediction markets. Kalshi has struck dozens of partnerships to provide its products and data to organizations including the UFC and Google. Even President Donald Trump has been among the loudest proponents, with his administration suing three states in April that sought to classify prediction markets as gambling. (Son Donald Trump Jr. is a strategic advisor to Kalshi.)

SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell may not have the chief executive title at Elon Musk’s South Texas rocket maker, but for the better part of two decades she has been steering the world’s most valuable private company. Combining her engineering background with her sales and business development talents, Shotwell has run operations at SpaceX since 2008. The company is building an entirely new economy in outer space by dramatically lowering the cost and raising the frequency of rocket launches. Keeping a low profile over the years, Shotwell has quieted the critics who once scoffed at Musk’s extraterrestrial ambitions, with results. Now, the largest businesses and investors are competing for the opportunities SpaceX has made possible, including building AI data centers in space.

That track record reflects Shotwell’s discipline and insistence on an intense culture with little tolerance for failures. Laura Crabtree, who worked at SpaceX as an engineer from 2009 to 2020, recalls Shotwell would regularly walk the floors, keeping everyone on edge. One time, Crabtree was working in mission control when Shotwell approached her and asked: “Are we still being fastidious about our operations? Are we getting complacent?” It was like that every day, Crabtree told Forbes: “You had to be on. You had to be paying attention.”

Though not well known outside her industry, Shotwell has long been described as the glue between Musk and everyone else. Not only does she hold teams across the organization accountable for results but also has been known to land opportunities once thought impossible, such as winning regulators’ approval to launch SpaceX rockets at a cadence that doubled, even tripled, the combined output of every other U.S. rocket maker. “I see Gwynne sometimes like the orchestrator inside the circus ring, who’s spinning the plates and just keeping all of the various different elements in equilibrium,” said Martin Halliwell, former chief technology officer of the satellite firm SES to the Los Angeles Times in 2024.

“The most important part of my job is to keep my now-23,000 employees focused on the great work they do every day,” said Shotwell to TIME Magazine in March. “Maybe my best contribution, other than revenue generation, would be keeping everybody focused, not listening to the noise.”

If Lopes Lara and Shotwell are operating today’s hottest tech companies from behind the scenes, Iconoclast 50 members, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and JK Rowling are rewriting the rules governing media and entertainment.

In 2020, Taylor Swift began rerecording her first six albums from scratch after losing the original streaming rights to investors. Her fans abandoned the old recordings and began streaming her re-released music. In May 2025, she used profits from her Eras Tour, which grossed more than $2 billion, to buy those rights back from Shamrock Capital for around $360 million. Swift is the world’s highest-earning female musician, with an estimated $2 billion fortune.

Similarly, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter—the second highest-earning female musician after Swift—built her $1 billion fortune on a bet made more than a decade ago by founding Parkwood Entertainment to run her own career rather than signing with established management companies. “I wanted to… be a powerhouse and have my own empire and show other women that when you get to this point in your career you don’t have to go sign with someone else and share your money and your success—you do it yourself,” she said in a 2013 interview.

In December, Beyonce became a billionaire after her record-breaking Cowboy Carter tour brought in more than $400 million. J.K. Rowling, similarly rejoined the billionaire club, 29 years after she published The Philosopher’s Stone, thanks in part to a lucrative series deal with HBO and a theme park rejuvenation with parent Warner Bros. The estimated $5 billion deal injects new life into the Harry Potter franchise, and a windfall into Rowling’s pocket.

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