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Hardworking Americans should take note when the media crowns another “self-made” tech billionaire while glossing over the wreckage left in the wake of Silicon Valley’s latest gold rush. Lucy Guo was declared the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire after a tender offer lifted Scale AI’s valuation, rewarding early paper holdings with a nine-figure windfall — a tidy reward for the kind of insider liquidity deals the coastal elite celebrate.
Guo’s rise reads like a familiar tech fairy tale: a college dropout who co-founded Scale AI at 21, left amid disagreements in 2018, yet insisted on keeping a meaningful stake that has now paid off handsomely. That retained equity — reportedly just under 5% — is the main reason she now sits on a billionaire paper fortune, a reminder that ownership, not daily toil, often decides who gets rich in Silicon Valley.
She didn’t vanish into philanthropy after her exit; Guo went on to launch Passes, a creator-monetization platform that attracted investor cash and deals with big-name personalities. Passes pitched itself as a cleaner alternative for influencers to monetize content, and investors stamped it with tens of millions in funding while media outlets fawned over its growth and celebrity signings.
But the glow quickly dimmed when serious legal allegations surfaced: a federal class-action suit accuses Passes and individuals tied to the company of producing and distributing sexual material involving minors. Those are not petty PR headaches — they are criminal allegations that strike at the conscience of any decent community and demand law enforcement attention, not corporate spin control.
Passes has fought back with denials and claims it uses industry-standard moderation tools and banned underage creators after the issue was flagged, yet the lawsuit says internal controls were overridden and that young creators were exploited. Tech platforms cannot have it both ways — they either enforce strict protections for children and cooperate with authorities, or they answer in court and to the public for the harm caused under their watch.
This episode exposes the rotten center of the Silicon Valley playbook: scale fast, monetize, and hope regulation or outrage doesn’t catch up before investors cash out. Conservatives who value family, community, and the rule of law should not apologize for demanding that entrepreneurs who profit from an online ecosystem also carry the weight of responsibility for what happens on their platforms.
Mainstream outlets and self-congratulatory profiles love to fetishize youthful wealth and “disruption,” but Americans should ask tougher questions: who paid the price for that disruption, and who is protecting kids and the public from the fallout? If tech founders are going to build empires on the backs of young creators and addictive platforms, they must be held to the same legal and moral standards as any other business.
We should applaud ambition and the American dream when it’s earned by honest work and genuine innovation, but celebrate it soberly, not blindly. Congress and state law enforcement have already started taking steps to close gaps around child exploitation and AI-generated material; parents, prosecutors, and lawmakers must keep the pressure on until platforms prove they put safety above bank balances.
