Sara Blakely: 2012 has been a good year for the 41-year-old inventor of Spanx. Blakely was recently named by Forbes as the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire, and also made Time‘s list of the 100 Most Influential Fashion Icons. Leave it to Katie Couric, who wrote Blakely’s blurb, to find humor in the entrepreneur’s success story: “The comic irony of Spanx is that the woman who became a billionaire after inventing them doesn’t even need them. Poor thing, she was a size 2 when the idea hit her.”