ByRichard Nieva,
As
Alexandr Wang walked down the staircase to the open atrium at Scale AI headquarters in San Francisco last June, employees didn’t know if he was still their boss. A day earlier, the data labeling company had announced a bombshell deal: Meta was acquiring 49% of Scale for $14 billion, and its founder CEO was leaving to lead Mark Zuckerberg’s newly-formed superintelligence lab. Amid a swirl of confusion, many Scale employees thought he had already left. So, surprised to see him, the workers applauded as he headed to the stage for the company all-hands. “I literally teared up,” Wang tells Forbes now. “In another life, I'd be so excited to continue at Scale.”
He doesn’t remember exactly what he told them at the meeting, but according to one person in attendance, Wang began by recounting how he’d started building Scale as a freshman at MIT, then started to cry. “This is so stupid. Why am I doing this?” the person recalled him saying.
Wang’s remark was in reference to his tears, but it seemed like an apt question to apply to the entire situation. In the wake of the surprise deal, which had leaked a few days earlier, all of Silicon Valley was similarly asking: Why was Wang giving up his own growing company, then worth $13.8 billion, to go work for Meta, which was playing catch-up in AI to Google, OpenAI and Anthropic?
