Settling into a gray upholstered chair in her living room in central London, beneath an enormous chandelier that makes even the nearby grand piano look compact, Michele Kang finds her mind drifting to the PBS home improvement series This Old House. She is fresh off a meeting with architects—down a glass-encased elevator to the conference room below her five-bedroom Knightsbridge apartment—and she has buildings on the brain.

She enjoys design, she says, clad in a cardinal-red double-breasted Valentino dress coat against the chill of a February afternoon, but she doesn’t have the patience to slog through a long television season. “I just want to see the before-and-after picture,” says Kang, 65. “Who cares about the middle? I want to see the final product.”

Photo by Levon Biss for Forbes

Her entire life, Kang has focused on the endgame. Her outcome-oriented approach has made her a phenomenally successful tech entrepreneur—ranking 28th on Forbes’ 2025 list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women (which publishes on June 3) with a net worth estimated at $1.2 billion. But while she might privately wish that she could skip the process, she’s also a woman who, after earning an economics degree from the University of Chicago and an MBA from Yale, meticulously mapped out the next 30 years of her career. She decided she would spend ten years consulting, to learn all aspects of a business, and then a decade as an executive before finally achieving her lifelong dream: becoming a CEO. She checked that last box in 2008 when she founded Cognosante, a health care IT company, which she sold last year for more than $1 billion.

Acquaintances and business partners describe Kang as unfailingly prepared. John Textor, a former executive chairman of sports-focused streaming service FuboTV, says he will try to catch her off-guard at her other home in Florida, but “it doesn’t matter how early I get to her. She’s still perfectly ready to go—couture, perfect hair, on her game. She’s been taking notes while I’m still waking up.”

Even so, Kang never could have foreseen her second act. Six years after a chance meeting at an event on Capitol Hill awakened an interest in professional soccer, she is the owner of three prominent teams: the Washington Spirit of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), OL Lyonnes of France’s Première Ligue and the London City Lionesses, recently promoted to England’s Women’s Super League. Even more unexpected, the humble Kang finds herself widely recognized as the global face of investing in women’s sports.

GOAL GETTER | Michele Kang’s London City Lionesses (top) earned promotion to the Women’s Super League by claiming the title in England’s second division this year—and it wasn’t her first championship as a team owner. Her Lyon club (middle) has won back- to-back titles in France, and the Washington Spirit, built around star Trinity Rodman, won the NWSL Championship in 2021.

“I didn’t know who Leo Messi was,” she says of the Argentine soccer superstar, laughing. “Now, here I am.”

Kang took control of the Spirit in 2022 at a $35 million valuation, then considered an astronomical price for a women’s team. In reality, it was a bargain. Forbes estimates the Spirit are worth $130 million, and they aren’t the only NWSL club to have seen such dramatic appreciation. Last year, L.A.’s Angel City FC sold at a record $250 million valuation to Disney CEO Bob Iger and his wife, Willow Bay. Then, in January, the league selected Denver as its 16th franchise for a $110 million expansion fee. “Michele really set the valuation boom in motion,” NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman says.

Once again, Kang has an ambitious goal in mind, and this time, she is expecting her grand plan to take a lot less than 30 years. In the not-too-distant future, she believes, women’s soccer teams will be trading for $1 billion or more—and she’s willing to spend whatever it takes to make that happen. Between purchasing her three clubs, seeding a handful of women-focused sports startups and

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