Young, controversial SF billionaire ditches CEO gig to work for tech giant
The news is official: Alexandr Wang is off to Meta
By Stephen Council, Tech Reporter
LATEST June 13, 10:30 a.m. Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old billionaire co-founder of San Francisco’s Scale AI, is officially leaving the company to work for Mark Zuckerberg.
On Thursday evening, Wang and Scale AI, which sells labeled and curated data to artificial intelligence labs, put an end to this week’s spate of rumors about the split, both releasing statements that said he’d be quitting the CEO job but remaining on Scale AI’s board of directors. Both statements said that Wang will now pivot his main focus to Meta’s AI efforts, which Zuckerberg is reportedly revamping.
The Menlo Park tech giant told the New York Times that it’s investing $14.3 billion in Scale AI, equal to about 23% of the Instagram and Facebook owner’s profits from 2024. Per Scale AI’s statement, the megadeal values the smaller company at more than $29 billion — making Wang, already known as one of the youngest billionaires ever, even richer.
“When this opportunity first presented itself, my immediate reaction was uncertainty,” Wang wrote in his statement posted to X. “The idea of not being a Scalien was, frankly, unimaginable. 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. It offered a rare chance to give back to everyone who has helped shape Scale, while setting the company on an even stronger trajectory for what's ahead.” (He said later in the statement that workers who own equity in Scale AI will receive proceeds from Meta’s investment.)
Wang called leading Scale AI the “absolute greatest pleasure of his life,” and said he “wouldn't change a minute” of his nearly 10-year tenure. He said Jason Droege, Scale’s strategy chief, will now become the company’s interim CEO.
June 11, 1:00 p.m. Alexandr Wang co-founded Scale AI at 19. Thanks to the rapid growth of the San Francisco data-labeling company, he was a billionaire at 24. Now 28, he’s a controversial figure, facing wage theft lawsuits from workers and pontificating in Washington about the existential stakes of artificial intelligence.
The spotlight grows still brighter, though. This week, a stream of media reports bore news of a high-dollar, high-stakes collaboration not yet confirmed or final: Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta would buy a large chunk of Scale and hire Wang to work in a new AI research lab at the Menlo Park tech giant. Wang, using an army of gig workers, has given Scale its profitable niche in the AI hype cycle by selling swaths of training data to Meta and its rivals. This deal would see Zuckerberg flood money into the company while snagging its CEO for his own purposes.
Neither Meta nor Scale has confirmed this news, and neither responded to SFGATE’s requests for comment. Instead, details have trickled out across the tech press, typically sourced to “people familiar with the matter,” so much could still be in flux.
Bloomberg first scooped the “talks” between the two companies on Sunday. Then on Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Wang would join a new AI lab at Meta focused on “superintelligence” and that Zuckerberg had been throwing seven- to nine-figure pay offers at competitors’ researchers to beef up the rest of the team. The Information wrote the same day that Meta would pay almost $15 billion for a 49% stake in Scale. Wang would retain control of Scale, via Meta’s voting rights, Newcomer chipped in. And Semafor added that Wang would remain CEO of Scale, with the smaller company owing Meta a large chunk of future work.
That work to come, more than Wang’s potential as a Meta employee, appears to be the clear focus of this megadeal. Scale has enlisted tens of thousands of people around the world to create, clean and label the data that AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic use to train the large language models behind their chatbots. Scale uses gig work, like a computer-based Uber or Lyft where “taskers” are given assignments like labeling the photos taken by an autonomous vehicle sensor or checking the grammar of a sentence. This well-labeled, curated data, Wang told Fortune in 2020, “isn’t sexy, but it really matters,” as it helps fuel the generative AI progress that much of Silicon Valley is hoping for.
But Scale has drawn controversy, both in the United States and abroad, where 34 out of 36 “taskers” in the Philippines interviewed by the Washington Post for a 2023 story said they’d seen payments from a Scale platform “delayed, reduced or canceled” after completing their work. A December lawsuit against Scale, Wang and other top AI executives, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, wrote, “Scale AI is the sordid underbelly propping up the generative AI industry,” and accused the company of wage theft and other offenses, as SFGATE reported. Scale’s spokesperson, at the time, said the company was in compliance with laws and touted its workers’ opportunities to earn flexible, supplemental income.
Wang attended President Donald Trump’s inauguration and then published a message to him as a full-page ad in the Washington Post. An accompanying letter online took on a congratulatory, militaristic tone: “There is much work to be done, and you have the right team in place to take on this challenge and ensure we maintain our lead against adversaries. Scale stands ready to be a partner to you and the Administration so that America wins the AI war.”
Should this deal with Meta close as reported, Wang will find himself alongside Mark Zuckerberg: two founder-CEOs with gobs of money, public personas in the AI discourse, aims of buddying up to the Trump administration and, of course, fair shares of controversy. It’s a match made in the money-flooded and politically dubious Bay Area tech industry of 2025.
Source: https://tinyurl.com/432swzxc
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