Sara Blakely (b. 1971)
Filed under the name Sara · May 21, 2026
Sara Blakely founded Spanx and became one of the youngest self-made female billionaires, and the word that actually matters in that sentence to me is "self-made" — she started that company with her own money, no family wealth or connections greasing the wheels, which is a genuinely different story than most billionaire stories I read about. I've spent my whole life working multiple jobs just to stay afloat, so I pay real attention to whether somebody's success came from actually building something from nothing or from already having a cushion most people don't get. Blakely's story, from what I understand, checks out as the real version of "started with basically nothing and built it herself." That's rare enough to be worth naming specifically instead of lumping her in with every other billionaire story that gets told the same flattering way regardless of how it actually started. I just put a small down payment toward my own first retirement account at forty-four; her scale is different, but the instinct to build something from scratch, I recognize.