Breanna Stewart

Company: UnrivaledTitle: Co-founderIndustry: Media and EntertainmentNotable in 2024: Stewart, along with co-founder Napheesa Collier, built a new women's basketball league from scratch, complete with disruptive compensation and ownership models in an effort to level the playing field for female professional athletes. She also led the Liberty to their first WNBA championship.

Breanna Stewart, better known as "Stewie," has accomplished nearly everything you can on a basketball court, including starting Unrivaled, a new 3-on-3 women's basketball league with fellow 2025 CNBC Changemaker Napheesa Collier.

In high school, Stewart was named the National Gatorade Player of the Year and a McDonald's All-American. In college, she led the University of Connecticut Huskies to four consecutive national championships, where she was named the Final Four's most outstanding player a record four times. The first pick in the 2016 WNBA draft, she's won Rookie of the Year, and MVP twice, is a six-time all-star, and has won three WNBA titles, including leading the New York Liberty, one of the league's original teams, to its first title in 2024. She's also led the U.S. women's basketball team to three straight Olympic gold medals, including in Paris in 2024.

Stewart has used her platform to push the game of women's basketball forward, both on and off the court. She had been consistently outspoken about the WNBA's need for charter flights, something it put into effect league-wide in 2024.

Like most other prominent WNBA players, Stewart also spent her WNBA offseasons playing in leagues across the world in places like China, Turkey and Russia. While that restricted the time players had to rest and spend with their families, those lucrative opportunities — in some cases with salaries that drastically outpaced their WNBA earnings — have been hard for many players to turn down.

After raising $35 million from investors for the league, Unrivaled said it was able to offer the highest average salary in professional women's sports history. The league's purposely built arena also came equipped with areas for players to train, record content and childcare facilities, among other features.

"I think that my entire mindset behind this and really doing things is for the next generation," Stewart told the New York Post about Unrivaled. "And making sure that we continue to elevate this game while we're still here playing."

But that doesn't mean she's not continuing to find new ways to elevate her storied career as well — perhaps not surprisingly, Stewart scored the first basket in Unrivaled history.