The AI genius who works at Meta is Alexandr Wang

Alexandr Wang took advantage of a void in the rapidly expanding AI market to become the youngest self-made billionaire in history

For a record amount, Mark Zuckerberg has now stolen him.

The day following Donald Trump's inauguration, The Washington Post published a full-page ad titled "Dear President Trump: America must win the AI war." It was written by Alexandr Wang, a successful networker and the billionaire "wunderkind" behind the start-up Scale AI.

Last month, his connections came to fruition when Wang, 28, became one of the most expensive "acqui-hires" in history after Metas founder, Mark Zuckerberg, invested £15 billion in his business and brought him into the fold to lead Metas new "superintelligence" division, says The Telegraph.

This is the company's largest transaction since 2014, when it paid £19 billion to acquire WhatsApp. Zuckerberg is placing a wager that Wang will be able to give Meta the advantage it needs to overtake competitors in the race to create and market artificial intelligence (AI) and, more specifically, to become the first to create systems that are smarter than humans. "Basically incidental" was how one investor described paying up for a 49 percent stake in Scale to the Financial Times. Wang was the true prize because Zuckerberg believed he was the best "wartime CEO" to spearhead his campaign.

The two men share many similarities, not the least of which is that they were both the youngest self-made billionaires in history. Wang has long "idolised" Zuckerberg, and the two have gotten close in recent months, visiting the Meta executives' homes in Palo Alto, California, and Tahoe. Given that he abandoned Scale's diversity, equity, and inclusion policies last year in favor of a "MEI" ("merit, excellence, and intelligence") hiring policy, Bloomberg speculates that he may have even contributed to Zuckerberg's shift to a more assertive management style. At Metas' Menlo Park headquarters, Zuckerberg has even "rearranged the desks" so that Wang and other leading AI experts are seated as close to him as possible.

In order to give Wang the "numerologically lucky" advantages of an eight-letter name, his Chinese immigrant parents gave him the name Alexandr when he was born in 1997, omitting the final e. But according to Entrepreneur, these were not your typical immigrants. His parents both worked as physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was first created by Robert Oppenheimer's team. In a TED talk from 2022, Wang noted that they were "brilliant scientists" who "accomplished a lot in advancing their field." "I wanted to work on something as impactful, or even more impactful than that" was a childhood dream. A math whiz, he enrolled at MIT after graduating early from high school. However, he quit college to relocate to San Francisco because he was itching to launch his own business. He told his parents that he would "a little white lie" and go back to school.

Building the AI titan for Meta is Alexandr Wang.

Wang and another college dropout, Lucy Guo, founded Scale AI in 2016. Although their initial plan to establish a business "to label and manage the data that companies use to train AI models" may not have seemed all that impressive, their services quickly became in high demand. According to the Financial Times, Wang became the youngest billionaire in the world by 2021 by taking advantage of this niche, which also allowed a plethora of powerful players to enter Silicon Valley. According to Accel venture capitalist and early investor Dan Levine, "there are very few companies that have deep relationships with every top AI research team" outside of Scale and Nvidia.

Meta has experienced a "halo effect" since Wang's arrival. According to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg has been ramping up his hiring of top talent as Meta transforms into an AI behemoth. He intends to invest hundreds of billions on two massive data centers called Prometheus and Hyperion. Alexandr Wang is the key to everything.