A man who knows how to make friends: Alexander Wang, creator of the $14 billion Meta superintelligence

Meta in June paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, a startup that partitions data for machine learning. That's how it was able to hire its co-founder and CEO Alexander Wang. Heheaded Meta's new division - Superintelligence Labs, the Superintelligence Lab - and should provide his new employer with leadership in the artificial intelligence race. Roman Mighty tells us who Alexander Wang is.

Wang was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, into a family of nuclear scientists. His parents, immigrants from China, work at the famous Los Alamos National Laboratory, created by Robert Oppenheimer to develop nuclear weapons. The mother is known to be specializing in plasma hydrodynamics.

Los Alamos is known as the place with the highest number of PhDs per capita in the United States. Van's parents and two older brothers have doctorates. His environment was all about science and technology. Hethinks it has influenced his development. "Every person in this town is working on some crazy science project. I felt like anything was possible at all." 

Wang has participated in math Olympiads since elementary school, performing at national-level competitions. He attended math camps and cites competition as a big part of his identity. "My sport was math," he says. 

As a teenager, he began working as a programmer for the question-and-answer service Quora, and after high school he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston - that year, 2015, he was first in the world rankings by Quacquarelli Symonds. 

By then, Wang says, machine learning engineers were starting to earn much more than the rest of Silicon Valley's programmers, which determined his choice of specialization - he went into AI research. 

After her freshman year at MIT, Wang dropped out of the prestigious university and moved to California with her friend Lucy Guo, with whom they worked together at Quora. Two years earlier, Guo had dropped out of Carnegie Mellon University after being selected for the Peter Thiel Fellowship. The billionaire provides grants to students who are willing to give up their university education in exchange for trying to create a new business.

Gohas made the list of 20 scholarship winners with a project that will allow students to complete homework assignments while playing a multiplayer game. 

Along with her, Etherium creator Vitalik Buterin, Somatic Labs unicorn founder Shantanu Bala, and Workflow app author Ari Weinstein were selected. Two years later, Wang signed up for Y Combinator's incubator, then headed by Sam Altman, the current head of OpenAI. Lucy Guo's project with the game was already forgotten by then. She and Wang persuaded Y Combinator to support Ava, an app for booking doctor's appointments. A few weeks later, their joint startup abruptly changed its focus to data partitioning. They named the company Scale AI.

Scale AI's first customers were Tesla and Cruise (it was later bought by General Motors).

To build autopilots, companies need huge datasets of marked-up photos of roads. The markings teach the cars to distinguish between road users, signs and traffic lights;

Later, Tesla and Cruise joined Apple (whose secret car project was never revealed), Aurora, Honda, Lyft, Toyota, Waymo and Uber. The company employs remote workers from Southeast Asia and Africa for markup. They are hired and trained by an internal outsourcing agency called Remotasks. The Washington Post found out that the workers were paid literally pennies and not fully: one employee said she was paid 30 cents for four hours of work instead of the promised $2. Freelancers can be fired by an impersonal e-mail;

In the US, the company is beinginvestigated at the federal level for failing to comply with already harsh US labor laws against the worker. In California, for example, Scale AI is being accused of failing to pay overtime and failing to protect workers from traumatizing content - some of whom had to watch scenes of violence and brutality on the job.

Content markup workers in third world countries complain of non-payment and account lockouts at any expression of dissatisfaction. In 2023, pay for some tasks for Filipino workers has dropped from $10 to less than one cent. Remote data markup work is often referred to as a "digital sweatshop."

Attitudes toward employees became one of the founding partners' disagreements. Guo, in herwords, insisted on solving workers' compensation problems; Wang insisted on rapid growth. In 2018, Lucy Guo left the company. Her remaining stake in Scale AI made her the youngest self-made female billionaire according to Forbes in 2025. 

A year after her departure, in 2019, Scale AI raised $100 million from investors. The round was led by Founders Fund, with Peter Thiel as a partner. The startup became a unicorn - it was valued at more than $1 billion for the deal, wrote Bloomberg. 

In 2021, investors valued the company at $7 billion. 25-year-old Alexander Wang was named by Forbes magazine as the youngest billionaire in history to make his fortune on his own;

In 2020-2021, during the covid pandemic, Wang's home was lived Sam Altman. By then, he was already heading the startup OpenAI. Perhaps at the same time Scale AI was beginning to dote on generative artificial intelligence as well.

After a boom in such models, the new direction has helped the company diversify its business. Its valuation reached $14 billion in 2024. Its customers now include Google, Microsoft, xAI, Amazon and Nvidia. Now many of them are thinking of ending the partnership for fear that private information will leak to competitors from Meta, Reuters reported.

In 2024, the billionaire articulated the company's hiring principle: "Scale AI is a meritocracy and we must always remain one." "We hire only the best, we seek and demand excellence and we do not hesitate to favor very smart people," he stated. In his view, the linkage of merit hiring was in no way inconsistent with the Valley's then-popular diversity policy.

Wang personally interviewed or approved the hiring of each of the nearly 1,000 full-time employees. What many would call micromanagement, he described as a great attention to detail and a desire to get to the heart of processes. 

Wang is not a scientist, his core competency is the ability to be a friend. He knows everyone in the industry and maintains relationships with the founders of well-known startups, talks to a huge number of people regularly, including in junior positions, and knows what they are working on and what they want to do, says Bloomberg. 

He has cemented himself at the top of Silicon Valley in part because of his ability to get in the right door and find influential connections, wrote The Week. 

According to the publication, it is the ability to network that is now in demand by Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. He, judging by an internal memo that published by Business Insider, is delighted with the new hire: "Alex and I have worked together for several years, and I consider him the most impressive founder of his generation. He clearly understands the historical importance of superintelligence. As co-founder and CEO, he has turned Scale AI into a fast-growing company involved in the development of nearly every leading model in the industry." 

Meta was also in a unique situation where the former youngest billionaire in the Valley became the boss of the current youngest billionaire.

Altman teased Wang, calling his trips to parties a "full-time job." Now he may not be in the mood for jokes. He says Meta is trying to poach key OpenAI employees with $100 million in signing bonuses (an internal meeting at the corporation denied this). 

Startups of the early 2000s preferred to stay away from big politics and cooperation with power structures. Wang considers this principle outdated and directly proclaims his love for Pax Americana.

"Human history is replete with wars, and only the last 80 years have been unusually peaceful," says he. - Much of that has been because of American leadership in the world."

Scale AI has sought to work for the U.S. Department of Defense almost from its inception. In 2020, that earned it a contract worth more than $90 million with the Pentagon, in 2022 - a deal worth $249 million. In 2025, the company was brought in to develop AI systems for strategic planning of military operations (the contract amount is not disclosed here);

According to words Wang, the idea of working for the government was met with skepticism from investors, causing him to lose some employees, but he remains confident in his decision. Wang attributes this to his childhood in Los Alamos, where he saw the intersection of national defense and technology. This spring, he says, in meetings in Washington, his interlocutors often compared the importance of artificial intelligence to the Manhattan Project, the U.S. nuclear weapons program: "I could always say, 'Yeah, I know, I grew up in the place where it was launched.'" 

Wang was shown educational videos about the history of atomic weapons at school every year at least once. He believes that just as the atomic bomb prevented war between the superpowers, so too will AI superiority become a reliable means of deterrence. 

But right now, he believes the U.S. could fall seriously behind China in AI technology if it doesn't implement it in government agencies, including defense. He believes the Chinese Communist Party has a plan to win the AI race in the long term, and an understanding that investing in artificial intelligence and other modern technologies could help Beijing make a big leap forward.  

In January, Wangsent a letter to US President Donald Trump, convincing him of the importance of winning the AI supremacy war with China. In the letter, the businessman said that China's spending on AI implementation is 10 times higher than that of the US government. "Not only are we not only spending little, but we are also spending inefficiently," he wrote. "Global tech companies invest according to a formula of '60% on computing, 30% on data and 10% on algorithms'." And the U.S. government spends 90% on algorithms, Wang complained.

Three days after taking office, the president signed an executive order stating the need for government support for AI technology to promote "human prosperity, economic competitiveness and national security."

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor