The Youngest Billionaire You’ve Never Heard Of: Alexandr Wang’s AI Empire

By Ken Rutkowski

He dropped out of MIT at 19. Now, at 28, Alexandr Wang runs a $7 billion AI juggernaut the U.S. government can’t function without. Here’s how he built a company that’s powering the future—and the tools you can use to follow in his footsteps.

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Picture this: a scrawny 17-year-old kid, hunched over a laptop, obliterating national math and coding competitions like it’s a Sunday afternoon hobby. Fast forward a year, and he’s slinging code at Quora, rubbing elbows with Silicon Valley’s elite. By 19, he’s not just another dropout from MIT—he’s Alexandr Wang, the mastermind behind Scale AI, a $7 billion empire that’s the invisible backbone of OpenAI, Meta, and the U.S. military. Oh, and he’s a billionaire. At 24, he was worth over $1 billion. Not bad for someone who never bothered with a “plan B.”