Diane Hendricks, cofounder of the roofing distributor ABC Supply, is the richest self-made woman in the world as of November 2026, with a net worth we estimate at about $23.6 billion. This list counts women who built their fortunes themselves, alone or as a cofounder, and leaves out anyone whose money came mainly from an inheritance or a spouse’s company. Every name below started with a business that did not exist until she helped create it.
Forget the stereotype of the glamorous founder with a lipstick line. Only one of the ten richest self-made women sells beauty products, and she does it as a retailer. The others make roofing supplies, cancer drugs, phone screens, AirPods parts, AI models and medical records software. Three of them supply Apple. Only two are under 50.
| Rank | Name | Net worth (USD) | Main source of wealth |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | Melanie Perkins | $5 billion | Canva |
| 9 | Falguni Nayar | $5.5 billion | Nykaa |
| 8 | Zeng Fangqin | $7.8 billion | Lingyi iTech |
| 7 | Denise Coates | $8 billion | Bet365 |
| 6 | Judy Faulkner | $9.9 billion | Epic Systems |
| 5 | Wang Laichun | $10.6 billion | Luxshare Precision |
| 4 | Zhou Qunfei | $13.5 billion | Lens Technology |
| 3 | Daniela Amodei | $14.2 billion | Anthropic |
| 2 | Zhong Huijuan | $18.5 billion | Hansoh Pharmaceutical |
| 1 | Diane Hendricks | $23.6 billion | ABC Supply |
The ranking
10. Melanie Perkins: $5 billion
Melanie Perkins was a university student in Perth teaching classmates how to use clunky design software when she decided the software was the problem. She pitched a simple, browser-based alternative to more than 100 investors who said no before Canva finally launched in 2013, with her partner Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams.
Canva now has about 240 million monthly users and 6 million paying teams, and private investors valued it at $42 billion in August 2025, though investors marked it lower, between about $30 billion and $35 billion, a year later. Perkins, who is CEO, owns an estimated 15%, the same as Obrecht. The couple have pledged to give more than 80% of their shares to the Canva Foundation over time.
We price her stake at about $33 billion for the whole company, in line with those 2026 marks, since the shares cannot be sold on a stock market.
9. Falguni Nayar: $5.5 billion
Falguni Nayar spent close to two decades as an investment banker at Kotak Mahindra before she left in 2012, at 49, to start Nykaa, an online store for beauty products. It was a late start by startup standards and a bet that Indian shoppers would buy makeup and skincare on their phones.
Nykaa grew into India’s best-known beauty retailer, online and in its own stores, and added fashion along the way. When it listed in Mumbai in November 2021 the shares nearly doubled on the first day, and she became India’s richest self-made woman.
Our figure values the promoter family’s stake of about 52% at late October 2026 share prices. That block includes the family trust of her husband, Sanjay, so read it as the household’s stake.
8. Zeng Fangqin: $7.8 billion
Zeng Fangqin worked for a state-owned company in Shenzhen, moved to the United States in the 1980s, spent time in Silicon Valley, then came home to build Lingyi iTech, a maker of precision components for smartphones and other electronics. Apple is among its best-known customers.
The company is listed in Shenzhen and, like many Chinese electronics suppliers, is hunting for growth beyond the iPhone. Zeng is chairman and general manager.
The figure is her Lingyi iTech holding at its November 2026 share price.
7. Denise Coates: $8 billion
Denise Coates trained as an accountant and helped run her father’s chain of betting shops in Stoke-on-Trent. In 2000 she bought the domain name Bet365.com, sold the shops to Coral, and launched an online bookmaker the next year from a portable office in a car park.
Bet365 now takes more than $65 billion in bets a year from customers around the world. Coates owns more than half of it and runs the business as co-CEO with her brother, John. She has stayed in Stoke the entire time, and the family company owns a majority of the local football club, Stoke City.
Our model values her stake of about 58% at the price reported in recent sale talks, then adds part of the pay and dividends she has drawn over the years, after tax.
6. Judy Faulkner: $9.9 billion
If you have seen a doctor in the United States, Judy Faulkner‘s software has almost certainly held your records. She started Epic Systems in 1979 in a Wisconsin basement with a few employees and a computer programming background, and she still runs it as CEO at 83.
Epic now supports the medical records of more than 250 million patients and posted $6.7 billion in sales in 2025. Faulkner and her family own about 43%, and she has refused for decades to take outside investors, go public or buy other companies. She signed the Giving Pledge in 2015 and plans to give 99% of her assets to a charitable foundation.
Epic has never sold a share to outsiders, so we value it against the price Oracle paid for rival Cerner, apply her family’s 43% and take a discount because the shares cannot be sold.
5. Wang Laichun: $10.6 billion
Wang Laichun spent about a decade at Foxconn, the giant Taiwanese assembler, before leaving in the late 1990s. In 2004 she and her brother set up Luxshare Precision and grew it from a small connector maker into a supplier of cables, wearables and phone parts. It became one of Apple’s most important partners and handles a large share of AirPods assembly.
Luxshare has since moved into car parts and data center hardware, which helped the shares through 2025 and 2026. Wang is chairwoman and general manager, and she has topped China’s ranking of leading businesswomen every year since 2022.
Her net worth tracks her half of the family holding company’s Luxshare shares at current prices.
4. Zhou Qunfei: $13.5 billion
Zhou Qunfei left school at 16 and went to work in a factory in Shenzhen that made watch lenses. In 1993 she started her own watch parts business with relatives in a Shenzhen apartment. When phone makers started looking for scratch-proof glass screens, she was ready, and her company became Lens Technology.
Lens makes cover glass and parts for Apple, Samsung and Huawei, and it supplies electric car makers Tesla and BYD. It listed in Shenzhen in 2015 and added a Hong Kong listing in July 2025. Her fortune jumped by more than $800 million in a single day in early November 2026 on a rally in Lens shares.
Her number comes almost entirely from her controlling stake in Lens Technology at market prices.
3. Daniela Amodei: $14.2 billion
Daniela Amodei studied English literature, was an early recruiter at Stripe, then spent three years at OpenAI before leaving in 2021 with her brother Dario Amodei and five colleagues to start Anthropic. She is the company’s president; Dario is CEO.
Anthropic makes the Claude family of AI models and has raised money from Alphabet and Amazon. Its valuation has climbed at a pace that is hard to believe: $60 billion in early 2025, and close to $1 trillion in a private funding round in May 2026. That jump turned each cofounder’s small stake into a fortune. At 39, Amodei is one of the two youngest women on this list and the only one who got here through AI.
We count the roughly 241 million shares listed for her and her husband in Anthropic’s October 2026 filing with US regulators, valued at $58.90 each.
2. Zhong Huijuan: $18.5 billion
Zhong Huijuan was a chemistry teacher before she moved into the drug business. She founded Hansoh Pharmaceutical in eastern China, built it into one of the country’s leading makers of cancer, psychiatric and diabetes drugs, and took it public in Hong Kong in 2019. Her husband, Sun Piaoyang, runs a rival drugmaker, Jiangsu Hengrui, and is a billionaire in his own right.
Chinese drug companies have become a hunting ground for Western pharma, and Hansoh is near the front of that line. It has billion-dollar licensing deals with Merck, and in October 2026 it signed a deal with Roche worth more than $15 billion in potential milestone payments to develop antibody-drug conjugates, a new class of targeted cancer drugs. Her fortune more than doubled during the boom in Chinese biotech shares.
This estimate rests on her controlling stake in Hong Kong-listed Hansoh, valued at the November 2026 share price.
1. Diane Hendricks: $23.6 billion
Diane Hendricks grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm, became a mother as a teenager and sold houses before she and her husband, Ken, founded ABC Supply in Beloit in 1982. The idea was plain: a roofing and siding wholesaler that treated contractors better than the competition did.
She has run the company as chairman since 2007, and under her it made its two largest acquisitions, Bradco in 2010 and L&W Supply in 2016. ABC Supply now has more than 900 branches and reported $20.2 billion in revenue in 2025. No self-made woman in the world is richer, and she has spent heavily rebuilding downtown Beloit along the way.
ABC Supply is fully private, so we value it on the multiples of listed building supply distributors and credit her with ownership of the whole company.
Special mentions
- Rafaela Aponte-Diamant (about $2 billion): MSC says ownership of the shipping group she cofounded passed to her children Diego and Alexa at the end of 2025, and no source shows a stake she kept.
- Oprah Winfrey (about $3.4 billion): the wealthiest self-made woman in entertainment, but short of the $5 billion needed for tenth place.
- Taylor Swift (about $2 billion): the first musician to become a billionaire mainly from her own songs and tours.
- Kim Kardashian (about $1.9 billion): built most of her fortune through the shapewear brand SKIMS.
- Rihanna (about $1.4 billion): her money comes mostly from Fenty Beauty rather than music.
What the richest self-made women have in common
- Boring industries pay. Roofing, phone glass, connectors and hospital software are not glamorous, but they come with steady customers and huge volumes.
- China’s factories made half of this list. Four of the ten built their companies in China’s manufacturing and drug boom, and three of them supply Apple.
- Family partnerships. Hendricks, Coates, Wang, Amodei and Perkins all started with a husband, partner or sibling. The self-made label rarely means alone.
- They kept control. Faulkner refused outside investors entirely, ABC Supply is still private, and Bet365 is family owned. Control let them keep a big stake through decades of growth.
- Patience. The median company on this list is more than 25 years old. Amodei is the exception that shows how fast AI can now mint a fortune.
The habits that let people afford this
Short audio lessons on money, mindset and discipline, in the Alux app.
Get the Alux app →FAQ
Who is the richest self-made woman in the world?
Diane Hendricks, cofounder and chairman of ABC Supply, with an estimated net worth of about $23.6 billion in November 2026.
Who is the richest self-made woman in America?
Diane Hendricks, chairman of ABC Supply, is worth about $23.6 billion and also tops our global list.
How much do you need to make the top 10 richest self-made women?
About $5 billion. Canva cofounder Melanie Perkins holds tenth place with roughly that amount.
Who is the youngest woman on the list?
Daniela Amodei of Anthropic and Melanie Perkins of Canva are both 39, the youngest in the top ten.
Is Taylor Swift the richest self-made woman?
No. Taylor Swift is worth about $2 billion, which makes her one of the richest self-made women in music but far below the business founders on this list.
Which country has the most self-made women billionaires?
China, by a wide margin, followed by the United States. Four of our top ten built their fortunes in China.
How we estimate net worth
Our estimates are based on public reporting, company valuations, and deal and earnings figures all compiled in an internal valuation model. They are approximate, and figures change over time as new information emerges.
Keep reading
- The most common ways to become a self-made billionaire
- Self-made billionaires who were once poor
- Boring businesses that can make you a millionaire
Last updated: November 2026.
