The AI Billionaires Who Are Barely Old Enough to Drink

"While his peers are searching for their first jobs, Foody is pursuing a " master plan," as he calls it, to upend the global labor market. His start-up, Mercor, offers an AI-powered hiring platform: Bots weed through résumés, and even conduct interviews. In the next five years, Foody told me, AI could automate 50 percent of the tasks that people do today. "That will be extremely exciting to see play out," he said. Humanity will become much more productive, he thinks, allowing us to cure cancer."

"His success at donut arbitrage made his mom nervous he might try to sell sketchier vices (drugs), so she sent him to Catholic school. There, he met his Mercor co-founders. In high school, he started a consulting business for online sneaker resellers that he said raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time he graduated. ChatGPT came out during his sophomore year at Georgetown, and he soon ditched school to build Mercor."

"The AI boom has become synonymous with a few giant companies: OpenAI, Nvidia, and Anthropic. All are led by middle-aged men who've had long careers in Silicon Valley. But many of the most successful new AI start-ups have been founded by people barely old enough to drink. Unlike OpenAI or Anthropic, Mercor is already profitable. Meanwhile, Cursor, a massively popular AI-coding tool run by 25-year-old Michael Truell, was recently valued at nearly $30 billion-roughly the same as United Airlines."

Brendan Foody, 22, runs Mercor, an AI-powered hiring platform valued at $2 billion and already profitable. Mercor uses bots to screen résumés and conduct interviews, and Foody predicts AI could automate 50 percent of current tasks within five years. He envisions large productivity gains that could enable breakthroughs like curing cancer and reaching Mars. Foody began entrepreneurship in middle school reselling donuts and later built a successful sneaker-reselling consulting business. He left Georgetown after ChatGPT's release to focus on Mercor. The AI startup wave also includes very young founders such as 25-year-old Michael Truell, whose Cursor was recently valued near $30 billion.

Read at The Atlantic