Alexandr Wang

lexandr Wang grew up in the shadow of New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Lab, the top-secret site where the United States developed its first atomic bomb during World War II. His parents were physicists who worked on the weapons’ projects for the military. Now he does too: Wang’s six-year-old San Francisco-based company, Scale AI, has already inked three contracts worth up to $110 million, contingent on the government’s needs, to help America’s Air Force and Army employ artificial intelligence (AI). Pretty impressive for a 25-year-old. A $325 million funding round in 2021 valued Scale, which generates an estimated $100 million in revenue, at $7.3 billion. Wang’s estimated 15 percent stake is worth $1 billion, making him the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. As a kid, Wang was a math whiz who competed in national coding competitions. By 17, he was working full-time coding at the question-and-answer site Quora, where he met Scale’s co-founder, Lucy Guo. He made a quick detour to MIT to study machine learning and started Scale with Guo the summer after his freshman year, with an investment from Y Combinator.