A 20-something Harvard dropout built Facebook into a social-media juggernaut. A 20-something MIT dropout is helping lead the company-now Meta Platforms-into the AI era.

Meta's stock is up nearly 20% since the early-September debut of Muse, its new AI assistant. The successful launch of the app, which has been No. 1 in Apple's App Store for two weeks, has brought a new level of fame and acclaim to Alexandr Wang, the young tech executive handpicked by Mark Zuckerberg last year to oversee Meta's AI efforts.

Previously the co-founder and chief executive of the data-labeling startup Scale AI, Wang has worked with Zuckerberg to build an operation that's been viewed as putting Meta back in the thick of the AI race.

Wang, 29, is the company's first senior executive from Gen Z, bringing an internet-flavored communication style that could help it connect with younger consumers. That's something the company needs as the user base of Facebook and Instagram ages, analysts say.

Zuckerberg, at 42, remains heavily involved in the work of Meta's AI lab. He is also a billionaire statesman who dines with President Trump, a father of three and lately a fan of high-end fashion.

Wang sports a mullet reminiscent of the podcaster Theo Von-whose show he has appeared on-and wore a camouflage thrift-store T-shirt and Crocs for a recent onstage appearance at the company's annual developer conference.

He's a native of the social-media ecosystem his boss built, boasting nearly one million followers on Instagram, where he posts photos with everyone from his friend actress Kiernan Shipka to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to French President Emmanuel Macron.

And he's provocative in a way that recalls the young Zuckerberg, who had "I'm CEO, Bitch" printed on his business cards-and who once drew criticism for telling an audience of aspiring entrepreneurs to only hire young people because they're "just smarter." On X, Wang jibes at competitors and posts risqué memes, and his actions at Meta have at times riled employees.

Mike Volpi, a partner at Hanabi Capital who sits on Scale's board of directors, said that when "you spend billions of dollars to bring onboard a non-Meta person in a very senior role in this company, it's going to ruffle some feathers." But, he said, "I would give both Mark and Alex an enormous amount of credit for actually being able to make it work."

Wang has succeeded in building hype for Muse, in part with an unconventional internet campaign. Now the challenge becomes keeping the momentum going as OpenAI, Google and others press ahead with their own offerings and as Meta continues to spend countless billions on the promise of the technology.

Meta declined to make Wang available for an interview.

Wang grew up in New Mexico, where his parents worked as physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the famous site of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's work on the Manhattan Project. He has said they started teaching him advanced physics in kindergarten and by ninth grade, he had begun crafting plans to start a company someday.

"I knew I wanted to do really big things, and it was not exactly clear how or what the path to do that would be," Wang said in a July interview with Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan.

Wang left high school early and moved to Silicon Valley to work at Quora, the question-and-answer website. In 2015, he enrolled at MIT and took five graduate computer science courses as a freshman. He soon dropped out to move to the Bay Area and work on the startup that would become Scale AI.

"I was just feeling really impatient," Wang told Von in a podcast interview last year.

In San Francisco, he enrolled his startup in a training program run by Y Combinator and met Altman, who was leading the incubator at the time. Altman and Wang would later end up living together during the pandemic.

As the AI boom took hold in the early 2020s, Scale grew into a key vendor for top AI labs, making Wang one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires.

He didn't get there without problems. In 2023, a contract with Meta was jeopardized when researchers discovered the data Scale supplied had been written by ChatGPT, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Scale blamed the bad data on contract workers in Kenya who had figured out how to game its system.

Wang ended up joining Meta in an unusual deal in June 2025. The company invested $14 billion into Scale, took a 49% stake and hired the CEO to help overhaul Meta's AI efforts after its latest model, Llama 4, didn't meet expectations.

"We had a lot of work to do," Wang said, recounting his early months at Meta on the Core Memory podcast earlier this year. "It turns out building a model from scratch in nine months, it takes a lot of painstaking effort."

Wang, whose previous work had given him extensive contacts at other AI labs, took the lead on recruiting researchers to Meta. Prior, Zuckerberg had embarked on an aggressive blitz himself, directly messaging candidates and inviting them to his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe.

As part of the pitch, Wang told researchers that an elite new team he was building, dubbed TBD Lab, sat in a special section near Zuckerberg's office, according to people familiar with the matter.

The special treatment shown to TBD hires, some of whom had pay packages in the hundreds of millions of dollars, created resentment among some employees who weren't asked to join the lab or given similar pay packages last fall. TBD's work is closely guarded, the area where they sit required special badge access for entry and the names of its members, which now number roughly 200, aren't visible on the company's internal organizational chart.

For Meta, and Wang, the stakes are higher than ever. The company is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers to train and power its AI, and investors have started to press Zuckerberg to see returns on the hefty investment.

In April, 10 months after the creation of the lab, Meta released its first new model, called Muse Spark. Wang acknowledged in an interview with Bloomberg that it wasn't "at the tier of the leading frontier models." But, he said, "we believe it's a very exciting data point on the trajectory."

Meta unveiled a model skilled at coding a few months later and then Muse.

The release last month represented the culmination of a year-plus of work led by Wang and Nat Friedman, head of Meta's AI-products division. Within 10 days, Muse hit no. 1 on Apple's U.S. App Store.

To help promote it, Wang embarked on a zany personal social-media campaign.

On his X account, Wang posted or reposted dozens of memes featuring the Muse mascot, Jolly. A number of them showed the fuzzy, blob-shaped creature in sexually suggestive poses; in one instance, Jolly's head had been replaced by Zuckerberg's.

"Most Meta employees are much more cautious about what they say," said Nu Wexler, a tech policy communications consultant who previously worked at Facebook. "But they've clearly given Alex wide latitude to share his thoughts."

As Wang's posts gained traction and Muse racked up downloads, the app also drew attention for alleged privacy and security concerns-a longtime Achilles' heel for the company.

Muse's launch also coincided almost exactly with a sharp rise in public debate about the potential for powerful AI to cause mass destruction. Zuckerberg has been among the voices in Silicon Valley pushing back against such fears and lobbying President Trump against new regulations.

On Tuesday, while Zuckerberg was at the White House for a summit of AI leaders, Wang was focused on a different threat: OpenAI's new Muse competitor, a personal AI agent called Dot.

In an appearance on CNBC to promote Dot, OpenAI's finance chief, Sarah Friar, accidentally confused the names of the two apps, naming Meta's product instead of her own company's.

Wang posted the clip on X with the caption: "it's ok sarah muse is thinking about you too."