The world’s richest self-made women made their money from shipping, a lung-cancer drug, a software firm begun in a basement and artificial intelligence, with the pop stars somewhere further down the page.
Ask a dinner table to name the richest self-made woman alive and the guesses drift towards Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the more lucrative recording contracts. Forbes’ answer is Rafaela Aponte-Diamant, the Switzerland-based cofounder of the Mediterranean Shipping Company, whom it listed as aged 80 in June 2025. She made her fortune in ships. In 2026 her company announced that its ownership had moved to the next generation, a sentence no pop star has yet had to issue.
Two lists answer the question, and both are Forbes’. The World’s Billionaires ranking, published in March 2026, settles the global top spot. America’s Richest Self-Made Women, now in its 11th year and released on 3 June 2026, names 43 women and, for the first time, admits no one worth less than a billion. Forbes scores each fortune from 6, the hired hand, to 10, the rags-to-riches entrepreneur. That scale is how a woman who built a company with her husband and ran it after his death sits on the same list as one who started in a basement. Every figure below is a Forbes estimate of a private fortune, made on a particular date, and best read as one.
Who is the richest self-made woman in the world?
Forbes put Aponte-Diamant at $44.5bn in its 2026 world ranking, the only self-made woman among the ten richest women on earth. She slipped from fifth to sixth among women over the year, which in this company counts as a quiet twelve months.
Forbes tells the beginning in a single line. A $200,000 loan bought the couple’s first ship, and within nine years there were 17. Her husband, Captain Gianluigi Aponte, is the man MSC’s own announcements call the founder, and the business has stayed in the family ever since.
Origin stories now cost a great deal more, and tend to be written by consultants.
What happened to MSC’s ownership in 2026?
On 13 April 2026, MSC announced that ownership had passed in the last quarter of 2025 from Captain Aponte to the couple’s son and daughter. Diego Aponte is Group President; Alexa Aponte Vago is Group CFO. The captain continues as executive chairman, and in the company’s release from Geneva he said: “With Diego and Alexa at the helm, I am confident that our Group will continue to thrive.”
Forbes set its figure for Aponte-Diamant in March, a month before the announcement. MSC is private and publishes no stake percentages, and its release describes the founder handing over without dividing anything into numbers.
The world’s richest self-made woman therefore heads the table at a company whose shareholder register is, by long habit, a family matter. Anyone who likes founders and their heirs side by side will want the Del Vecchio family next.
Who are Zhong Huijuan and Zhou Qunfei?
Forbes’ standalone global list of self-made women, valued in June 2025, put two Chinese founders third and fourth, behind Aponte-Diamant and Diane Hendricks. Zhong Huijuan, whom Forbes describes as a former chemistry teacher, founded Hansoh Pharmaceutical in 1995. Her break came four years later with Gainuo, a lung-cancer drug, and Forbes had her at $15.6bn, aged 64.
Zhou Qunfei started in 1993 with a watch-parts business she set up with relatives in a Shenzhen apartment. That business became the foundation of Lens Technology. Forbes, which lists her in Hong Kong, had her at $10bn, aged 55.
Neither had a famous surname to start with, and neither needed one.
Who is the richest self-made woman in America?
Diane Hendricks, for the ninth year running, with an estimated $21.7bn. She and her late husband, Ken, founded ABC Supply in Beloit, Wisconsin, in 1982, and she took the company on after his death. Forbes classes her as self-made, and its sliding scale leaves room for exactly this kind of partnership.
She also managed to be one of only five women on the list whose fortune fell over the past year, while four-fifths of the others grew richer. Topping the table while sitting in the shrinking minority is a distinction only an annual list can confer.
September’s Forbes 400 told the same story from a wider angle. Forbes found only 13 of America’s 62 richest women are self-made, with Hendricks still the wealthiest of them. The same tally lists Peggy Cherng of Panda Express at $8.3bn, Marian Ilitch of Little Caesars at $7.6bn and Jayshree Ullal of Arista Networks at $7.2bn. A fair amount of American money still begins with lunch.
Who is Daniela Amodei?
The Anthropic cofounder stands second on the June list. Forbes gives her age as 38 and calls her “arguably the most powerful woman in AI”. It put her at $15.5bn, and its September Forbes 400 held her at that figure, which made her the country’s 75th-richest person of either sex.
Twenty of the 43 women, nearly half, trace their wealth to technology. Amodei is the most conspicuous of them.
Who is Judy Faulkner?
Judy Faulkner founded Epic in a basement in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1979, and Forbes ranks her third in America at $9.6bn. That gives Wisconsin, a state better known for dairy than dynasties, two of the top three places.
In her Giving Pledge letter of May 2015 she wrote that she had never wanted to be a billionaire living lavishly, and that her estate plan sends the money from her Epic shares into a foundation. Plenty of people say the first part. The second part comes with paperwork.
Are Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Rihanna on the list?
They are, and further down than the dinner table assumed. Forbes has Taylor Swift at No. 23 with $2bn, twenty places below the woman who started a software company in a basement. Beyoncé arrives this year, tied at No. 39, with Forbes crediting her 2025 Cowboy Carter tour. Forbes estimates Rihanna’s fortune at about a billion, much of it from Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty, and places Oprah Winfrey at No. 16.
Fame is worth a great deal on this list. A company that has lasted forty-odd years is worth more.
Is the number of self-made women billionaires growing?
It is growing slowly, from a narrow base. Forbes counted 122 self-made women billionaires worldwide in 2026, up from 113 a year earlier, and its headline statistic remains that just 14% of the world’s wealthiest people are women.
The newest arrival shows how fast the door can open. Luana Lopes Lara, a Brazilian-born former ballerina and cofounder of the prediction market Kalshi, became the youngest self-made billionaire at 29 in December 2025, according to Forbes, when Kalshi raised $1bn at an $11bn valuation. She made the June list on her first appearance.
Ballet, it seems, was the warm-up.
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