Mark Zuckerberg is making a 28-year-old CEO the lynchpin of Meta’s investment in the AI race.
On Thursday, Meta confirmed that it’s buying a 49% stake in Scale AI, giving the company a valuation of over $29 billion. The tech giant is spending about $15 billion for the stake.
Scale’s founder and CEO, Alexandr Wang, is joining Meta to work on the tech giant’s AI efforts.
Here are five key things to know about Wang.
1. He’s an MIT dropout.
After his freshman year, Wang dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He and cofounder Lucy Guo had launched Scale AI three years before, out of famed Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator. Their summer 2016 cohort included The Athletic, a sports news site now owned by The New York Times, and furniture retailer Burrow.
“The great thing about Scale is that it is taking advantage of an opportunity that is hiding in plain sight,” Jared Friedman, a YC partner, said on the accelerator’s blog in 2016.
Wang had an expansive vision for the company.
“Long-term, we want to power any human-powered process for any company,” he told the YC blog.
2. Wang became the youngest self-made billionaire in 2021.
Three years after cofounding Scale AI, Wang was becoming the talk of Silicon Valley. Forbes compared him to fellow dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
At 24, he became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. He then briefly fell off the billionaire’s list. As of June, Forbes estimates that Wang is worth $3.6 billion.
“Focus on building the business and then the rest will kind of take care of itself,” Wang told Business Insider in 2020.
Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund helped Scale reach unicorn status with a $100 million investment in 2019.
In five years, Wang had grown his business to the point that he was the youngest self-made billionaire in the world.
Scale AI
3. Wang is a frequent visitor to DC.
Like other tech CEOs, Wang has made repeated trips to Washington as Congress and the White House weigh AI policy.
Prior to President Donald Trump’s 2024 win, Wang, along with just about every major tech CEO, attended then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s series of closed-door AI-focused panel discussions.
Wang told lawmakers that a 2018 trip to China made it clear to him that US national security depends on AI.
“The race for AI global leadership is well underway, and our nation’s ability to efficiently adopt and implement AI will define the future of warfare,” Wang said in written testimony that was made public.
Earlier in 2023, Wang testified before a House subcommittee on military uses for AI.
4. He wrote to Trump about his AI views.
A day after Trump’s second inauguration, Wang outlined five ways that the president could advance AI in his first 100 days. Scale published an open letter to Trump in a full-page ad in the Washington Post on January 21.
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“If the United States remains on our current trajectory, we risk falling and staying behind,” Wang wrote in the open letter.
The CEO wrote that he wanted the US government to emulate tech giants by spending more on data and compute. He also wrote that the administration should establish an interagency task force to review regulations to ensure jobs in AI can flourish in the US.
Wang attended Trump’s second inauguration.
“Honored to be invited to attend the Inaugural at the Capitol!,” he wrote on X. “Optimism about AI and tech is palpable in DC this week.”
5. He is poised to become Zuckerberg’s newest AI exec
On Thursday, Scale said that Wang is joining Meta to work on the company’s AI efforts. He will continue to serve as a director on Scale’s board.
Wang is going to work on Meta’s superintelligence arm. The tech giant said in a statement that it would share more information about the team soon.