Martha Lane Fox
Company: Lastminute
Wealth estimate: £72 million
Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho, of Martha to her friends, made her fame and fortune by investing in the internet at the right time.
She was in her twenties when she founded lastminute.com in 1998 alongside Brent Hoberman. The holiday booking site sold for $1.1 billion in 2005 - a key year in her life as it turned out.
It was not a total rags to riches tale as the Baroness was born to the historian Robin Lane Fox and was privately educated in Oxford. But after graduating from her city’s famous university, she moved into the tech world.
She has gone on to serve on the boards of WeTransfer, Chanel and Twitter - where she left in 2022 during the Elon Musk takeover. While Musk sceptics would say she might have dodged a bullet, she did also pocket a reported £2 million. The Baroness, as her title suggests, is also now a member of the House of Lords where she sits as a crossbencher.
She is now the mother of twins with her partner Chris Gorell Barnes, a fellow digital entrepreneur, but counts herself lucky to be alive after a car crash nearly killed her in 2005. After making a recovery after agonising months and a dozen operations, she said: “The human spirit is formidable, not just in me but in other people. You just do not want to give up, even when you are in unbelievable pain, feeling like your life has ended.”
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