The world’s “youngest self-made billionaire” made the vast fortune aged just 25, and is a powerful player in the Artificial Intelligence revolution.
Alexandr Wang, co-founder and chief executive of AI firm Scale AI, made his debut on Forbes’ billionaires list in May 2022, aged just 25, as the youngest self-made ten-figure net worth individual in the world.
The American business magazine defines “self-made” billionaires as those “who built a company or established a fortune on her own, rather than inheriting some or all of it”.
The San Francisco-based business Wang helped build supplies labour and software for tech tasks including “labelling data to train AI” for “large language models such as Chat GPT”, as per The Week.
Since then, he is thought to have more than doubled his estimated networth to a staggering $2 billion (£1.6bn) as of February 7, 2025, according to Forbes.
The company helps some 300 clients, including Flexport and General Motors on projects including supply chain efficiency and autonomous driving, as per the outlet.
Wang, now 28, is thought to own an estimated 15% of Scale, which investors valued at $7.3 billion (£6bn) in 2021.
The son of weapons physicists, Wang grew up in the quiet town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, made famous as the site where Oppenheimer and a team of scientists developed the United States’ first atomic bomb in the 1940s.
Like other billionaire tech entrepreneurs, Wang dropped out of University, leaving his mathematics and computer science course at the prestigious Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) after only a year.
While working at Quora, Wang met Lucy Guo with whom he teamed up to start Scale in 2016. After several rounds of investment, the company’s valuation hit the $7billion-mark in 2021.
The year before Wang was hailed by Forbes as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, it had named Luminar Technologies founder Austin Russell as the youngest, with both men aged just 25 when they reached the dizzying net worth valuation, as per Press Gazette.
Russell, who also left University early, founded and is the CEO of automotive sensor company Luminar Technologies, which went public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company in December 2020.
He was estimated to have a net worth of $1.6billion (£1.3billion) as of April 5th 2022, though it fell bellow $1 billion in 2023 following a drop in Luminar’s stock price, as per Forbes.
