The Forbes magazine shared his billionaire ranking «self-made» and under 40 years old. The main condition is that they have built their fortunes from scratch with their own ideas and not based on inheritance. Edwin Chen He tops the list with a net worth of $18 billion.
Since 2008, and for 11 consecutive years, Mark Zuckerbergthe creator of Facebookled the list of the rich»self-made» («self-made» in English) 39 years or younger.
When Zuckerberg entered the World’s Annual Billionaires List Forbesbecame the youngest millionaire in history at age 23, leaving behind the co-founders of Google, Larry Page y Sergey Brin.
On May 14, 2024, the founder of the social network that connects friends around the world turned 40, and due to the age group that characterizes this ranking, he was left off the list.
The Irish brothers Patrick Collison37 years old, and John Collison, 35, founders of the online payment platform Stripe, took first place, but it did not last long because a new self-taught billionaire under 40 years of age entered the annual ranking for 2025: Edwin Chen.
Forbes’ ranking of self-made millionaires under 40 was updated in January 2026. (Photo: Capture www.forbes.com)
AI emerges, the company valued at 21 billion dollars created by Edwin Chen
As reported ForbesChen, the 38-year-old young American specialist in data analysis, studied mathematics, computer science and linguistics at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), founded in 2020 artificial intelligence startup Surge AI.
His company generated $1.2 billion in revenue in 2024 thanks to clients like Google and Anthropic, who hired his services to label data and AI training that they incorporated into different platforms.
The entrepreneur who became a tycoon in just five years, also occupies position 55 in the list of ««The 400 millionaires in the United States»published by Forbes in 2025. There he had been highlighted for being the youngest of that entire elite of businessmen, headed by Elon Musk with assets of 428 million dollars.
Forbes indicates that since the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), young billionaires have multiplied. (Illustrative photo Clarín Archive) His immeasurable fortune is also due to the fact that Chen owns 75% of the company, and financed it himself, with the savings from his 10 years as an employee of Twitter, Google, Facebook and Peter Thiel’s Clarium hedge fund.
He currently lives in an apartment in Manhattan, from where he gave his first interview to Forbes. Before this report, very few knew him, and in reality that was his intention: to go unnoticed while he built his empire.
«I would like my data labeling company to encode the wealth of humanity»Chen said in conversation with Forbes during his talk with journalist Phoebe Liu.
He revealed that his favorite story, Story of Your Lifepublished in 1998 by science fiction author Ted Chiang, was largely an inspiration for creating his own company focused on learning Artificial Intelligencesomething that long ago seemed futuristic and impossible.
To carry out his ideas, he consulted professors from Stanford, Princeton and Harvard with specialized knowledge, and sent open applications to one million independent workers in more than 50 countries.
Its goal was to help pose questions that might stump the AI, to evaluate the models’ responses, and to stipulate criteria that would help the AI generate better answers.
«I’m worried that instead of build an AI that really helps us advance as a species, cure cancer, solve poverty, generate universal understanding about the big questions of humanity, instead we are simply optimizing AI,» he said.
Edwin Chen is dedicated to training different AI models with his company Surge AI. (Illustrative photo Clarín Archive) «I really believe that what we are doing is so crucial for all AI models that, without us, the IAG –General Artificial Intelligence– a technical term for when AI equals or surpasses human capabilities – simply will not materialize,» Chen said.
Vegan, 20,000 steps per day and polyphasic sleep: Edwin Chen’s routine
Chen grew up in Crystal RiverFlorida, a Gulf Coast city of 3,400 people, known for its manatees. His parents immigrated to the United States from Taiwanand they opened a Chinese restaurant with Thai and American influences, which they called Peking Garden.
The young man worked there since he was a teenager to help his parents progress. But his real interest was languages and mathematics. «As a child I wanted to learn about 20 languages. and I loved spelling bees,» he recalled.
When he was in eighth grade, he received a full scholarship for his last two years of high school at the boarding school. Choate de Connecticut, who has alumni of John F. Kennedy, John Dos Passos and Ivanka Trump.
Edwin Chen during one of the few interviews he gave on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast. (Photo: LinkedIn Video Capture)He then came to MIT, where he specialized in mathematics and co-founded a linguistics society. At that time I had a schedule of polyphasic sleepwhich involved breaking up their sleep into multiple short breaks, such as a 30-minute nap every six hours.
He is also vegan and has a strict routine of 20,000 steps a day. He considers physical and mental health very important, and prefers a low media profile.
In his third year of college he began an internship at Peter Thiel’s former hedge fund in San Francisco and put his studies on hold for two years.
He then completed the required courses and applied for the degree. Then came his jobs at Twitter, Google and Facebook, where he worked in various positions related to the Content moderation and recommendation algorithms.
In each position, Chen faced the same problem: it was difficult to obtain high-quality human-labeled data on a large scale. «I left my last job at Twitter in 2020 to figure this out on my own, and founded Surge AI that same year, but the truth is that I developed preliminary versions of this system for the last 10 years of my life«he stated.
«Was profitable almost from day one launch,» he revealed. Among the first clients to contact him were Airbnb, Twitch and his former employer, Twitter. Then he joined Meta, Microsoft, the AI laboratories Anthropic and Mistral: he collaborated with the training of Gemini from Google and Claude de Anthropic.
«One of the reasons I financed myself is that I always hated hated the Silicon Valley status game«Chen confessed. In his opinion, generating money with venture capital leads to massive overhiring.
«Us we have only 250 employeesfull-time, part-time and consultants, while AI Scales -the rival company- has four times more staff and less income,» he exemplifies.
The young man was also highlighted by the magazine Time in his list of 100 most influential personalities of 2025as one of «The Architects of AI» for his role as founder and CEO of Surge AI.
The company provides the service to other technology conglomerates seeking to obtain high-quality data to improve their AI models. According to figures obtained by Forbes, in January 2026, Chen’s company reached an estimated value of $24 billion.
