Alexandr Wang Makes Anti-China Waves As World's Youngest Self-Made Billionaire
By Tom Kagy | 02 Apr, 2025

Wang is soaring with the AI industry while pushing to be a loud voice in Trump's anti-China crusade.

Of the 21 people aged 30 or younger on the 2025 Forbes list of global billionaires, American Alexandr Wang is the youngest and one of only two self-made billionaires.

At the tender age of 28 Wang has already seen his billionaire status come and go once before.  His first billion arrived in 2021 when he was 24.  His Scale AI was valued at $7.3 billion based on a recent round of venture financing and his 15% stake in the private company.  That first billion faded with the 2023 tech slump.

Wang's current net worth of $2 billion is based on his remaining 14% share of the $14 billion valuation implied by a recent $1 bil financing round.  That figure is likely to stand for the forseeable future as Scale AI has entrenched itself as the AI industry's leading data labeling and training company.  Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Meta, GM and Cisco are among the hundreds of AI hopefuls that rely on Scale AI to train their proprietary data to improve the efficiency of their generative AI apps.

As Wang himself has proclaimed loudly to the AI industry, data is one of the three pillars of AI, along with compute (i.e. Nvidia GPU-based accelerators) and the algorithms that process data to enable machine-learning, or so-called generative AI.

As champion of AI's data pillar Scale does the bulk of the industry's unglamorous work of plowing through terabytes of data and "training" or shaping it into formats that can be used efficiently by the AI apps of various individual clients.  For example, GM uses Scale to train its data for input into its self-driving AI platform.  

Unlike most tech unicorns with similar valuation levels, Scale's staff is small, only about 900.  The actual data training or labeling work is performed by about 100,000 contractors hired by two Scale subsidiaries, Outlier AI and Remotasks.  Those contractors are the digital equivalent of migrant workers, and are recruited across national borders from among college students, junior tech workers and random digirati moonlighting for extra income.

Those who see AI as a magical technology are disappointed to learn that its reliability and usefulness depend 100% on the quality of the data used to train each model.  When data labelers make errors the AI system builds reasoning and output on those errors.  In an effort to add a layer of quality assurance to the reliability expected of an anonymous army of global gig workers, Scale has a smaller team of staffers and contractors run tests on sections of data.  This system still allows many glaring and even totally incomprehensible errors, as any user of AI chatbots can attest.

As with many businesses dealing with large numbers of loosely affiliated workers, Scale has been hit with lawsuits by dozens or perhaps a couple hundred contractors claiming to have been stiffed for their work.  Some have even managed to get Congress to schedule a hearing about their complaints, a somewhat anomalous level of exposure given that the claimed non-payments total a mere few tens of thousands of dollars, a negligible sum in the context of the many substantial labor and economic issues currently facing Congress.

One reason for the partisan attention from the Democratic side is that Alexandr Wang has forcefully injected himself into the Trump-side limelight by loudly and insistently proclaiming that the US must win the AI "war" with China as it is our "greatest geopolitical competitor", an incongruously parochial and extremist position for a young Chinese American working in the global AI industry.  Most Americans recognize China as our top geopolitical competitor but few see any benefit in turning that into the central theme of their corporate messaging.

That line of bombast may be a function of the political tendencies amply demonstrated by Wang for several years.  Not only has he been skilled in navigating the Silicon Valley venture establishment to secure funding for Scale, Wang has been using high-level government influencers to make himself a loud voice welcomed by the Trump regime and the GOP side of Congress.

In February alone Wang's political action agenda led to meetings with house speaker Mike Johnson, U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, and French president Emmanuel Macron.  His messaging at such meetings was consistent with the full-page ad Scale placed in The Washington Post in January urging President Trump to “win the AI war with China.” This was accompanied by Wang's open letter to Trump with the same overwrought messaging. 

In short, Wang, as de facto leader of the least visible leg of the AI tripod, appears determined to overshadow both Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (AI's compute leg leader) and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (algorithm leg leader) as the loudest voice in support of Trump's wildly xenophobic anti-China crusade.  

It's possible Wang's hicktown view of US-China relations was conditioned during his childhood in Los Alamos, New Mexico, epicenter of the US nuclear program where his parents worked as physicists for the National Laboratory.  Early on Alexandr Wang established himself as a math and computer prodigy.  In high school he qualified for the Math Olympiad Program, the US Physics Team and became a finalist in USACO. Too impatient for college, Wang moved to Silicon Valley to work as a software engineer at the wealth management firm Addepar.

During his one-year stay at MIT Wang majored in mathematics and computer science before dropping out with fellow student Lucy Guo to co-found Scale AI in 2016.