Alexandr Wang: the AI wunderkind who takes his seat at Meta
Alexandr Wang became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire by exploiting a niche in the booming AI market. Now Mark Zuckerberg has poached him for a record sum

“Dear President Trump: America must win the AI war,” ran a full-page advertisement in The Washington Post on the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Its author was Alexandr Wang – the billionaire “wunderkind” behind the start-up Scale AI and an accomplished networker.
Last month, his connections came to fruition when Wang, 28, became one of the most expensive “acqui-hires” in history after Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, invested $15 billion in his business and brought him into the fold to lead Meta’s new “superintelligence” division, says The Telegraph.
The deal is the company’s biggest since buying WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014. Zuckerberg is betting that Wang can provide what Meta needs to catch up with rivals in the race to develop and commercialise AI – and, in particular, achieve the holy grail of becoming the first to develop systems that surpass human intelligence. Paying up for a 49% stake in Scale was “basically incidental”, one investor told the Financial Times. The real prize was Wang, who Zuckerberg had decided was the ideal “wartime CEO” to lead his push.
MoneyWeek
Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE

Sign up to Money Morning
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
The two men have plenty in common; not least the fact that they have both in their time achieved the accolade of becoming the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. Wang has long “idolised” Zuckerberg and in recent months the pair have become close, spending time at the Meta boss’s houses in Tahoe and Palo Alto, California. He may even have had a hand in Zuckerberg’s conversion to a more muscular management style – having himself ditched diversity, equity and inclusion policies at Scale last year to focus on a “MEI” (“merit, excellence and intelligence”) hiring policy, notes Bloomberg. Zuckerberg has even “rearranged the desks” at Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters to seat Wang and other top AI talent as close to himself as possible.
When Wang was born in 1997, his Chinese immigrant parents named him Alexandr – missing out the final e because they wanted to give him the “numerologically lucky” benefits of an eight-letter name. But these were no ordinary immigrants, says Entrepreneur. Both his parents were physicists who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where Robert Oppenheimer’s team had earlier developed the atomic bomb. They were “brilliant scientists” who “accomplished a lot in advancing their field”, Wang observed in a 2022 TED talk. From an early age, “I wanted to work on something as impactful, or even more impactful than that”. A maths prodigy, he finished high school early and enrolled at MIT. But he itched to start his own company and dropped out of college to move to San Francisco. He reassured his parents he would resume his studies – “a little white lie”.
Alexandr Wang: building Meta's AI titan
In 2016, Wang started Scale AI with Lucy Guo – a fellow college drop-out. Their idea of starting a company “to label and manage the data that companies use to train AI models” may not have seemed particularly exciting, but their services were soon in demand. Exploiting this niche made Wang the world’s youngest billionaire by 2021 – and it also opened the doors to a welter of high-powered players across Silicon Valley, says the Financial Times. “There are very few companies that have deep relationships with every top AI research team” apart from Scale and Nvidia, notes venture capitalist Dan Levine of Accel, an early investor.
Wang’s arrival has had something of a “halo effect” at Meta. Zuckerberg – who plans to spend hundreds of billions on two gigantic data centres dubbed Prometheus and Hyperion – has been continuing his recruitment blitz of top talent as Meta reinvents itself as an AI titan, says Bloomberg. Key to it all is Alexandr Wang.
This article was first published in MoneyWeek's magazine. Enjoy exclusive early access to news, opinion and analysis from our team of financial experts with a MoneyWeek subscription.
Get the latest financial news, insights and expert analysis from our award-winning MoneyWeek team, to help you understand what really matters when it comes to your finances.
Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.
She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.
Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.
She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.
-
What is the 25x retirement rule and does it work?
The 25x retirement rule has been around for decades but many experts question if it is a suitable strategy
-
When is the self-assessment tax return deadline?
If you are self-employed, rent out a property or earn income from savings or investments, you may need to complete a self-assessment tax return. We run through the deadlines you need to know about
-
Are wealthy whisky enthusiasts leaving Britain?
Collectables Wealthy whisky enthusiasts are heading to tax-friendly countries such as Dubai, where there is more disposable income to spend on collectable luxuries like rare whisky.
-
Nvidia results live: shares fall despite earnings beat
A miss on data centre revenue has seen Nvidia's share price fall in overnight trading following Q2 results
-
'The rise and fall of Kodak is a lesson for the tech giants'
Opinion The long decline of Kodak – a once-dominant company – shows why no business is safe from disruption, says Matthew Lynn
-
Could DeepSeek boost China tech stocks?
DeepSeek appears to have been and gone as far as the stock market’s reaction is concerned, but Chinese tech companies are eagerly embracing advances in AI
-
8 of the best properties for sale with kitchen gardens
The best properties for sale with kitchen gardens – from a 17th-century timber-framed hall house in Norfolk, to an Arts & Crafts house in West Sussex designed by Charles Voysey with a garden by Gertrude Jekyll
-
Why investors can no longer trust traditional statistical indicators
Opinion The statistical indicators and data investors have relied on for decades are no longer fit for purpose. It's time to move on, says Helen Thomas
-
Investors rediscover the virtue of value investing over growth
Growth investing, betting on rapidly expanding companies, has proved successful since 2008. But now the other main investment style seems to be coming back into fashion.
-
Could the AI megacap bubble burst?
The business cycle could be moving into territory where megacaps have historically lagged. Could this prompt the bursting of the AI megacap bubble?