Into The List America s Richest Self Made Women 2025 I Forbes

Hi everyone, I'm Maggie McGrath, editor of Forbes Women. This year marks the 10th anniversary of a Forbes franchise list known as America's Richest Self-Made Women. Joining me now is an editor who has worked on the list since its inception, my colleague, Assistant Managing Editor Keri Dolan. Keri, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks Maggie, great to be here. So the list is out now, and before we dive into what we will find on the 2025 edition of America's Richest Self-Made Women, I would love to zoom back a little bit. Take us back 10 years. What was the inspiration behind creating this list and this franchise? Yeah, so I give credit to Louisa Kroll, who is an executive editor now. She was a longtime editor along with me on the billionaires list, and we were both frustrated at the low number of women on the list, particularly women who had built their own fortunes. Many of the women on the billionaires list either inherited their fortunes from a late husband or a father, and it's hard to have a billion dollar fortune. So we started this list, at least as Louisa's idea, to shine a light on entrepreneurial success of women. We launched with 50 women in 2015, and in 2020 we expanded to 100 women on the list, and we've been doing 100 women ever since then. 100 women ever since then, and can you give a sense for how fortunes have changed over the years? Who was the richest woman in 2015, and is she still on the list this year? So the richest woman in 2015 was Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos. So she is not on the list anymore. She is in jail now, and her company and Theranos value went to zero. So this was capturing a moment in time, as we do with all these lists. We capture, we figure out what people's net worth is. We pick a day, and we take everybody's net worth on the same day, and sort of in the 2015, Theranos was not yet discovered to have been the company, the fraudulent company that turned out to be. So she was number one. Number two on the list then was Diane Hendricks, and she is number one today, and she's been number one for the past eight years. She's been number one for actually all of eight out of ten years on the list. Long time Forbes viewers may remember that we interviewed Diane for the 50 over 50 list a few years ago, calling her America's most successful female entrepreneur practically of all time. She has a really incredible story. Carrie, what stands out to you about the way Diane has built her fortune, or what do you want folks to know? Yeah, I mean, she's probably not a very well-known name to most Americans. Not like, you know, Oprah, or some of the other folks on our list. But she built with her late husband this roofing, and then expanded into building supplies company called ABC Supply. It's a wholesaler, so it doesn't sell, you know, most people won't be buying from them. And her husband sadly died in 2007. She is the owner and the chair of the company. She's expanded it hugely. The revenues have, like, more than quadrupled in the 10 years since she's been on this list. And her fortune's gone up to $22 billion this year, down from around $3.9 billion, I think, in 2015. She's a big donor to the Republican Party, and she's also put a lot of money into the surrounding community in Wisconsin where she's from. So Diane has gone from number two in the first ever edition of this list to number one in 2025, the list that is out now. How many of the original members of the self-made women's list from 2015 remain on the list today? 36 of the original 50 are still on the list today, and that would be even more, except for the fact that several of the original 50 have died in the past year. Most recently, Elaine Nguyen, the casino mogul from Nguyen Resorts, passed away in April. Susan Wojcicki, who was the CEO of YouTube, died last year. And Judy Love from Love's Truck Stops, Love's Country Store, I guess is the official name of the company, she died as well. So it's a pretty good number from the original group that are still on the list. 36 is more than I would have guessed, honestly. Does this say anything about the way businesses are built or fortunes change over time in America? I mean, I think that a lot of the businesses that women have founded or co-founded that are on our list are private companies that don't have to deal with the whims of the stock market. They're really focused on growth and at a reasonable pace, not trying to grow that's beyond what's sustainable. And they have businesses that serve real needs. I mean, the other interesting thing about this list is, you know, I feel like a lot of business coverage focuses on tech companies, but there are a lot of non-tech fortunes on this list. You know, number one being, of course, the home building sector that Diana Hendricks is in, which I think is a testament, you know, what do we all spend our money on? I mean, sure, we're all looking at Google, but we're also maybe buying cosmetics, drinking wine, doing all these other things that these women on the list have businesses in. That's a really good point. Let's zoom out also and look at the criteria for this list. We've talked around a little bit of it, but as you and the team are putting this list together, what are you looking for? Right. Well, the first question may be to address what do we mean by self-made? Because this has been an issue of debate on the internet over time. People think sometimes when we say self-made that these women did it all by themselves with no help, and that's not what we mean at all. What we mean by self-made is these women have either founded or co-founded a company, or become an executive at a company, or some of them are authors or entertainers. And that's as opposed to having inherited a business from, you know, a family member. So that's kind of, that's sort of the Forbes definition of self-made. But we're looking for women who are self-made, and there's a net worth component. The net worth cut off changes every year. In 2015, number 50 was worth $250 million. This year, number 100 is worth $350 million. And that's up from $300 million last year. And the other thing that we're looking at is just women who have their businesses in the United States. So some people are not necessarily American citizens. Celine Dion is one who's on the list. She lives in Las Vegas. We put her on the list for that reason. There are Rihannas from Barbados. I mean, she lives in Los Angeles, right? So we've got people who are not necessarily original, you know, American citizens, but the bulk of what they do is here in the United States. You talk about how in 2015, number 50 was worth $250 million. This year, number 100, so the poorest person on the list of richest self-made women, is worth $350 million. What accounts for these fortunes going up and up and up? Is it entirely the stock market? Well, yes and no. So for example, to value a private company, you can go back to Diane Hendricks' roofing company. We look at what a company, what a private company would be worth if it were publicly traded. So we're looking at publicly traded competitors to ABC Supply to figure out, and looking at the revenue of the company. So the revenue of ABC Supply, of course, and other private companies have grown significantly over the years. And then we look at what the market's doing. So in a year when the stock market is down a lot, private company valuations may be down as well. It's been kind of interesting because this year, we've had a lot of volatility in the stock market because of concerns about the tariff, various Donald Trump policies. And at the end, though, the net worth of the group went up. Altogether, these 100 women are worth $155 billion, which is $1 billion more than last year. So it's an increase. And obviously, the cutoff to get onto the list has increased. But it's not as big an increase as we've seen as we look at the group as a whole. It's not as big as an increase as we saw like the prior year, for example. So the stock market's calmed down a bit. There has been so much volatility. The market was going up and down and up and down while this entire list was in production. But as you look at the final 100, who are the other names that maybe stand out to you as notable newcomers or just notable stories that our audience should be aware of? Yeah, we've got a number of notable newcomers. We've got nine newcomers to the list this year. Perhaps the best known is Selena Gomez, who is an actress and singer and entrepreneur. She started Rare Beauty, a cosmetics company, in 2020, and it's really taken off. And most of her net worth is in hers. She's a majority shareholder of Rare Beauty, which is sold mostly online and in one, I think it's in Sephora. And we've got her on the list for the first time with an estimated net worth of $700 million. We've got a couple of other newcomers, one new biotech billionaire. Her name is Maki Zanganay. She's on her second potential success of a biotech company. She works with her now husband, Bob Duggan, who's been on our billionaires list for a while. They are testing a lung cancer drug that has shown quite good promise. And then another interesting newcomer is Michelle Kang, who sold her health IT company and has become quite a power in women's professional soccer. She owns the Washington Spirit team and two other teams in Europe, and she's really committed to taking those teams as far as she can. She's a fascinating figure. She talks about needing equity for women in soccer, but also promoting men too and just making better policies for all athletes. I want to go back to Selena Gomez because you mentioned her net worth, and I think that number might surprise some people because there are some rumors on the internet that she's a billionaire, which we are careful with that B word, Carrie. So what would you say to folks who think that Selena is a billionaire? What I would say to folks that think that Selena is a billionaire one of the things that's happened is we talked about the stock market being in flux and some of the values for publicly traded cosmetics firms have come down. And because we value private companies as if what would they be worth if they were public because those public market values for cosmetic firms are down. Our estimate of Rare Beauty's value is that it's worth more than a billion dollars, but we don't know exactly what she owns. We understand that she owns majority stakes. She's not commenting on how much more than 50% she owns. So we've taken a conservative estimate of her ownership and we get her at $700 million. The company's doing great. It's just that as best we can tell, it doesn't share a lot of data, but we did find some revenues for 2023, but we're looking at what the market is valuing cosmetics firms at now. Speaking of singers and billionaire status, Taylor Swift became the youngest female self-made billionaire in 2023, but someone else earned that title this year. Can you tell us about her? Right. So a woman who's not very well known, Lucy Guo, who is 30 years old, became the youngest self-made woman billionaire in April. She is the co-founder of an AI company called Scale AI. And basically what that company does is it has people label data to train AI. She co-founded the company in 2016. She left the company in 2018 and has got to start two other things since then, but she held on to most of her stake. And that company is private still, but it sold shares at a valuation that bumped the valuation of the company to $25 billion in late April. And that makes her worth $1.3 billion. It's an incredible story that folks can read more about on Forbes.com under your byline. But as we talk about this list, I'm curious, I know you look at this so closely, so you might not be surprised in any given year, but were there any surprises for you this year? Well, one of the things that's interesting to me is to see how many people can make this list without being company founders. Just like with our billionaires list, most billionaires either founded or co-founded a company or maybe inherited it. We have a smaller subset of billionaires that we call hired hand billionaires, people who got hired at a company and became a billionaire that way. One of those examples is also on our list, Sheryl Sandberg. She got hired at Facebook very early on and she has a billion dollar fortune from being the chief operating officer at Facebook, now Meta. We have two new women this year who are in that same executive rank, two women who are at NVIDIA, the big semiconductor chip design company. Their chief financial officer, Colette Kress, and the executive VP of operations at the company, Deborah Showquist, both of those women made their company. They've both been at NVIDIA for a long time. They've gotten stock over years and most of their net worth lies in the value of their NVIDIA stock. So that was, I thought, kind of interesting. And we've got a new private equity billionaire, also another soccer owner. So besides Michelle, there's a woman named Lauren Lichtman. She and her husband, Arthur Levine, started a private equity firm out of Beverly Hills and became soccer fans, first supporting UCLA and women's soccer there. And then they bought into the San Diego Wave, the National Women's Soccer League team, last year. And so we've got two different newcomers on our list who are women's pro soccer supporters, which is pretty interesting, I think. It's interesting and it perhaps reflects the moment that we're in for women's sports with increasing valuations, increasing attention, that inflection point that came with the quote-unquote Caitlin Clarke effect seems to be sustaining itself, at least for the time being. That's one takeaway that I have based on what you've said. But you talked a little bit about the tangible businesses that a lot of these women have, right, in home building, in cosmetics, in the things that we buy in our day-to-day lives. Are there other takeaways that you see this list giving in terms of maybe what it says about female entrepreneurs in this moment in time? Yeah, I mean, if you look at who's in charge at the largest companies in the country, the CEOs of those companies are still, it's a minority, it's a very small, you can probably count in one or two hands the number of women CEOs at the largest. But when we look at this list, I think it's a to women's entrepreneurship. Women are, you know, kind of repeating that point, there's different, lots of different ways to make money. Starting your own business and building it to be super successful is one interesting way. I mean, one of the stories that I love is a newcomer last year, Marilee Kick, who was a teacher, and she came up with this idea for these cocktails in these colorful plastic containers. They're called buzz balls, very popular with college students. And they're different color plastic and different like, you know, I think tequila Rita is one of the name of the different flavors. And she sold the company to Sazerac, one of the largest alcohol companies in the spirits companies in the country. And I mean, she built it, you know, from scratch, her two sons helped her. I mean, it was like a family affair. Her husband helped her as well. You know, who would have thought teacher to cocktail mogul? I mean, you know, this, these are the stories that I think are so make this list so interesting. Those are the stories I love, because it shows what's possible. She's a public school teacher who ultimately ends up on the Forbes list of America's richest self made women. It's a bit of the American dream. But I want to ask you about that title that I just said, America's richest self made limit women. Why is it so important to track the wealth because I get pitches for this list, and I'm sure you do too. For people who are successful, but then don't want to talk about the money? Why is it so important that we keep talking about the money? It's so interesting, I feel like, you know, if we had to generalize, I don't like to generalize, but there are women who were on the cusp of making this list, including a couple that I was emailing with, who were, I think, proud of their success, but didn't want their net worth broadcast. And I mean, on the one hand, I think people who don't want that see it as an invasion of privacy. I mean, I think when you work for a very big business, it's not that private, right? So, you know, I don't know, some women are quite proud to be on the list. I mean, this woman, Maki Zanganay, the new biotech billionaire on our list, I think she's super excited that because it means her company's doing, you know, on the verge of doing very well. Anyway, the stock price is up a lot. I think, you know, it's sort of the Forbes way to keep track of success with money. This is what we do with our Forbes for 100 richest Americans list. This is what we do with our world's billionaires list. It's not in any way to denigrate anyone who's built a super successful two or three or $4 million company that will never make this list. I think there's all kinds, there's room for all kinds of success. We're just trying to pick some of the kind of the people at the apex of success, and they become role models for people. They do. And of course, money is power. And this list of 100 women command power in a way that, as you note, might be different than America's corporate CEOs, but is nonetheless powerful on a day to day basis in terms of building the goods and services that we all are using. Yeah. And that's a really good point. Because in addition, you know, I mentioned that Diane Hendricks is a big donor to the Republican Party. Another big donor to the Republicans is Elizabeth Uline. She and her husband started a packaging company called Uline, and they are big GOP supporters. So I mean, you know, people can use their power in different ways. They can help start, you know, support pro sports teams. They can work in politics. I mean, there are others who do a lot in philanthropy. I mean, there's lots of ways and some do all of those, right? Some may do both philanthropy and business. But yeah, they do have a lot of power. That's a really good point. There's so much that we could keep talking about, but we'll let people explore the package on Forbes.com on their own. But before I let you go, is there anything we missed? Anything else that you would highlight about the 2025 list of America's richest self made women? I think we've pretty much covered the highlights. The only other thing I would say is, you know, back to that theme of money. We have 38 billionaires on the list this year, which is, and we had 18 back in 2015. So we've more than doubled the number of billionaires in a decade, which is, you know, an interesting statistic to leave on, I would say. That is an interesting statistic to leave on. Carrie Dolan, Assistant Managing Editor at Forbes. Thank you so much for sitting down and talking about America's richest self made women. Everyone watching, you can read the package on Forbes.com and please check out all of the associated articles that we've been talking about.