Self-made billionaire college dropout Alexandr Wang signs $14.3 billion deal to bolster Meta's AI efforts: ‘There's a huge premium to naivete'
Alexandr Wang, once the youngest self-made billionaire in the world, has agreed to join Meta to work on AI 'superintelligence,' leaving the startup that made him rich after dropping out of MIT.
Alexandr Wang's Scale AI just inked a $14.3 billion investment deal with Meta, which transitions the 28-year-old out of his CEO position at the startup he co-founded with fellow billionaire and estranged business partner Lucy Guo.
Wang announced Thursday on X that he's leaving Scale AI to join Meta as part of an agreement that gives CEO Mark Zuckerberg's tech company a 49% stake in the startup. Wang became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at age 24, just five years after dropping out of college and creating the San Francisco-based company. Now, his estimated net worth is $3.6 billion.
'I started this company right out of freshman year of MIT and never looked back,' Wang wrote in his memo to Scale AI employees on Thursday. 'I wouldn't change a minute of it.'
Wang will continue to serve as a director on the company's board while working on 'superintelligence efforts' for Meta, a Scale AI spokesperson told CNBC, but did not elaborate on specifics. In his note, Wang said he would poach a few 'Scalien' employees to take with him to Meta, but did not name them.
In the interim, Scale's board and Wang decided to appoint chief strategy officer Jason Droege as a temporary CEO. Prior to joining Scale AI in August 2024, Droege was a venture partner at Benchmark and an Uber vice president, according to his LinkedIn.
For Wang, he attributes some of his success throughout the years to being a relative newcomer to the AI industry.
'I believe there's a huge premium to naivete,' Wang told Daniel Levine on a 2023 Youtube podcast. 'Approaching industries with a totally blank slate and without a fine grain understanding of what makes things hard is actually part of what allows you to accomplish things.'
Wang also encouraged startup founders to be more 'open-minded,' something he and his colleagues at Scale AI championed from the the company's early days.
Zuckerberg has reportedly made AI a top priority for 2025. The investment in Wang's expertise may be part of the reported assembly of a 50-person superintelligence AI team at Meta meant to gain ground on rivals like Google and OpenAI.
Meta's recent Llama 4 AI models received a lukewarm response from developers, CNBC reported in May.
Wang will bring along with him experience working with Meta rivals, including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Meta is one of Scale AI's biggest clients.
In his memo, Wang wrote he was hesitant to agree to the offer to leave Scale AI at first, calling the option 'unimaginable' after raising $1 billion last year from investors including Amazon and Meta at a valuation of $13.8 billion.
'But as I spent time truly considering it, I realized this was a deeply unique moment, not just for me, but for Scale as well,' Wang wrote.
This deal more than doubles Scale AI's valuation to $29 billion.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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