Evicting the CEO She Became

I made eighty million dollars before I turned twenty-four.

It came from a proprietary compression algorithm I wrote during my senior year of college—an unglamorous piece of backend architecture that suddenly became the spine of three major video-streaming platforms. When the buyout offers started rolling in, I didn’t hold out for equity or board seats. I took the cash wire, paid the federal and state taxes, and bought a thirty-two-story commercial tower of glass and polished steel right in the heart of downtown. Paid in full. No mortgage, no institutional lenders, no leveraged debt.