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Tuesday, April 29, 2025
经济学人：制造业回美为何太难 不只因人工贵 还有…
经济学人的分析指出，川普低估了制造业回归美国的难度，而且他自己的政策还会让生产变得更加困难。
1940年代末，欧洲和日本的工业能力被严重破坏，美国占据了全球一半以上的制造业产出，世界各地大量依赖美国的商品。
去年，美国的制造业产出只占全球的略高于十分之一，而且商品进口比出口多出了1.2万亿美元，让川普非常不满。
川普希望通过在美国庞大的市场外筑起关税壁垒，迫使企业将生产迁回美国，让美国再次成为制造业强国。从制药巨头礼来公司，到电气设备制造商施耐德电气，最近都有企业宣布计划响应川普。4月28日，IBM也加入了行列，宣布将在美国投资制造大型主机和量子计算机。
然而，包括百事公司和酩悦·轩尼诗-帝亚吉欧公司在内的其他企业则警告说，关税将挤压他们的利润。
川普低估了企业将工厂迁回美国的困难，也没有意识到他的政策可能产生的各种反效果。
首先是劳动力供应问题。
美国生产工人的平均工资是中国的两倍多，是越南的近六倍。但即便如此，高工资仍不足以吸引足够多的美国人进入制造业。
美国人口普查局最近的一项工厂调查显示，五分之一的工厂表示，劳动力供应不足导致他们无法满负荷运转。
希望在美国制造的外国企业负责人抱怨，熟练工人稀缺，例如焊工、电工和机械操作员。本月，台积电首席执行官魏哲家表示，公司在亚利桑那州生产芯片的努力“受到当地劳动力短缺的限制”。
指望自动化解决问题的人恐怕要失望了。
川普的商务部长霍华德·卢特尼克最近坚称，“数百万、数百万工人用小螺丝组装iPhone的大军”将很快回到美国，届时可以通过自动化完成。
美国生产工人的平均工资是中国的两倍多，是越南的近六倍。但即便如此，高工资仍不足以吸引足够多的美国人进入制造业。
美国人口普查局最近的一项工厂调查显示，五分之一的工厂表示，劳动力供应不足导致他们无法满负荷运转。
希望在美国制造的外国企业负责人抱怨，熟练工人稀缺，例如焊工、电工和机械操作员。本月，台积电首席执行官魏哲家表示，公司在亚利桑那州生产芯片的努力“受到当地劳动力短缺的限制”。
指望自动化解决问题的人恐怕要失望了。
川普的商务部长霍华德·卢特尼克最近坚称，“数百万、数百万工人用小螺丝组装iPhone的大军”将很快回到美国，届时可以通过自动化完成。
然而，美国制造业实现机器人大规模应用可能还需要很长时间。根据国际机器人联合会的数据，2023年，美国每万名制造业工人中仅有295台工业机器人。尽管比2020年的255台有所增加，但远低于中国的470台和韩国的1012台。
与卢特尼克的说法相反，据称苹果计划将在美国销售的iPhone转到印度组装。
建设工厂的难度是美国制造业面临的第二大障碍。
过去四年，经通胀调整后，美国工厂建设的年化支出翻了一番，这在一定程度上得益于前任政府向芯片制造商和绿色技术企业提供的补贴。然而，许多新建项目被拖延甚至搁置。
欧洲化学品公司索尔维，暂停了在亚利桑那州建设用于半导体生产的电子级过氧化氢工厂的计划。美国芯片部件制造商Pallidus取消了在南卡罗来纳州建厂的计划。
与卢特尼克的说法相反，据称苹果计划将在美国销售的iPhone转到印度组装。
建设工厂的难度是美国制造业面临的第二大障碍。
过去四年，经通胀调整后，美国工厂建设的年化支出翻了一番，这在一定程度上得益于前任政府向芯片制造商和绿色技术企业提供的补贴。然而，许多新建项目被拖延甚至搁置。
欧洲化学品公司索尔维，暂停了在亚利桑那州建设用于半导体生产的电子级过氧化氢工厂的计划。美国芯片部件制造商Pallidus取消了在南卡罗来纳州建厂的计划。
这反映了美国建筑行业的困境。
芝加哥大学布斯商学院的奥斯坦·古尔斯比和查德·西弗森在2023年的一篇论文中指出，建筑行业的人均产出比1960年代的峰值下降了40%。他们将原因归咎于过度监管、邻避主义以及缺乏按时交付项目的激励等因素。
近年来，建筑业也遭遇了劳动力短缺。
与此同时，美国现有工厂也在老化。全国大约5万家制造工厂中，有一半以上建于30年前；平均厂龄约为50年。
美国建设能力的不足还导致基础设施老化和负荷过重，这是制造业发展的第三大障碍。大部分电网建于20世纪60至70年代，已接近或达到使用寿命终点，这是停电日益频繁的原因之一。
芝加哥大学布斯商学院的奥斯坦·古尔斯比和查德·西弗森在2023年的一篇论文中指出，建筑行业的人均产出比1960年代的峰值下降了40%。他们将原因归咎于过度监管、邻避主义以及缺乏按时交付项目的激励等因素。
近年来，建筑业也遭遇了劳动力短缺。
与此同时，美国现有工厂也在老化。全国大约5万家制造工厂中，有一半以上建于30年前；平均厂龄约为50年。
美国建设能力的不足还导致基础设施老化和负荷过重，这是制造业发展的第三大障碍。大部分电网建于20世纪60至70年代，已接近或达到使用寿命终点，这是停电日益频繁的原因之一。
同时，工厂若想接入电网，往往要等待数年。交通基础设施状况也不理想。根据美国道路与交通建设者协会去年的一项研究，美国三分之一的桥梁需要更换或修复。这与东亚地区流畅高效的供应链网络形成鲜明对比。
制造业重回美国的路上，困难重重。
川普不仅没有着手解决这些问题，还可能让美国制造业的前景更加艰难。他打击移民并驱逐非法入境者的举措，可能加剧工厂和建筑工地的劳动力短缺。他的关税政策提高了从建造工厂所需的钢铁到工厂设备的一切成本，也增加了进口原材料和零部件的价格。
美国制造业使用的中间投入品中，近三分之一依赖进口。
此外，川普在关税政策上的反复无常也带来了巨大不确定性。许多企业负责人表示，他们仍在等待明确哪些国家会被征收关税，以便决定是否调整生产布局。
尽管美国的制造业岗位数量下降，但美国在全球供应链中依然扮演着关键角色，尤其是在半导体和医药等领域开发世界领先的知识产权。每年，美国的研发支出接近1万亿美元，超过任何其他国家。
制造业重回美国的路上，困难重重。
川普不仅没有着手解决这些问题，还可能让美国制造业的前景更加艰难。他打击移民并驱逐非法入境者的举措，可能加剧工厂和建筑工地的劳动力短缺。他的关税政策提高了从建造工厂所需的钢铁到工厂设备的一切成本，也增加了进口原材料和零部件的价格。
美国制造业使用的中间投入品中，近三分之一依赖进口。
此外，川普在关税政策上的反复无常也带来了巨大不确定性。许多企业负责人表示，他们仍在等待明确哪些国家会被征收关税，以便决定是否调整生产布局。
尽管美国的制造业岗位数量下降，但美国在全球供应链中依然扮演着关键角色，尤其是在半导体和医药等领域开发世界领先的知识产权。每年，美国的研发支出接近1万亿美元，超过任何其他国家。
川普的贸易政策正将这一切置于风险之中。他不应沉溺于对过去的幻想，而应让美国专注于设计未来。
Novo Nordisk opens weight loss drug Wegovy to telehealth; Hims & Hers shares rocket 18%
Novo Nordisk on Tuesday said it will offer its weight loss drug Wegovy through telehealth providers Hims & Hers Health, Ro and LifeMD to expand access to the blockbuster treatment now that it is no longer in short supply in the U.S.
Shares of Hims & Hers soared 18% on Tuesday, while Novo Nordisk’s stock rose 3%.
The Danish drugmaker is racing to capture more patients now that many compounding pharmacies are legally restricted from making cheaper, unapproved versions of Wegovy, with rare exceptions. Patients flocked to those compounded versions while Wegovy was in shortage due to skyrocketing demand.
“We felt it was really important to work hard to establish a collaboration with telehealth companies so that there could be access to Wegovy as the compounding is winding down,” Dave Moore, executive vice president of U.S. operations at Novo Nordisk, told CNBC.
“We’re really pleased about the level of interest to access branded Wegovy and to start to sort of catch people as they come off of compounded medicine,” he said.
Moore added that the new partnerships make the experience “seamless” for patients since it allows them to access Wegovy straight from their telehealth providers, which “makes it very easy” for them to get the drug shipped directly to their homes.
Patients will be able to access Novo Nordisk’s new direct-to-consumer online pharmacy, NovoCare, directly through the telehealth providers.
That pharmacy offers Wegovy for $499 in cash per month – roughly half its usual monthly list price – for patients without insurance coverage for the weekly injection.
Each telehealth company’s price may be higher because they likely include additional services, a Novo Nordisk spokesperson told CNBC.
Hims & Hers said it will begin offering all dose sizes of Wegovy along with access to 24/7 care, nutritional guidance and ongoing clinical support this week, starting at $599 per month to eligible cash-paying patients with a prescription.
The medication will cost Hims & Hers customers more since it comes with added access to care, the company’s CEO, Andrew Dudum, told CNBC in an interview. He said he thinks the company’s partnership with Novo Nordisk will serve as a case study for how patients get access to and get prices for “great medicine” and other forms of treatment.
Ro opted for the lower price, announcing Tuesday it will offer access to all doses of Wegovy for $499 per month. The company provides 24/7 messaging, one-on-one coaching, educational content and more through its monthly membership called the Body Program, which does not include the cost of medication.
“Adding Novo Nordisk’s FDA-approved treatments at the best available cash price will help more patients nationwide get the obesity care they need to achieve their goals, particularly those without insurance coverage,” Ro CEO Zach Reitano said in a release.
Earlier this month, Hims & Hers announced that patients could access Eli Lilly’s weight loss medication Zepbound and diabetes drug Mounjaro, as well as the generic injection liraglutide, through its platform. But unlike the company’s collaboration with Novo Nordisk, Lilly released a statement clarifying that it has “no affiliation” with Hims & Hers.
Hims & Hers started prescribing compounded semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s diabetes drug Ozempic and Wegovy, in May of 2024. The company has largely had to stop offering the compounded medications en masse, but some consumers may still be able to access personalized doses if it’s clinically applicable, Dudum said.
“That was one of the first things we shared with Novo is that we will always fight on behalf of what consumers we believe have the right to get,” Dudum said. “The regulation is very clear.”
During Food and Drug Administration-declared shortages, pharmacists can legally make compounded versions of brand-name medications. They can also be produced on a case-by-case basis when it’s medically necessary for a patient, such as when they can’t swallow a pill or are allergic to a specific ingredient in a branded drug.
But drugmakers and some health experts have pushed back against the practice, largely because the FDA does not approve compounded drugs.
Larger, federally regulated compounding pharmacies that make copies of semaglutide in bulk without prescriptions face a legal deadline of May 22 to stop marketing and selling those versions. Smaller, state-licensed compounding pharmacies that manufacture semaglutide copycats for individual prescriptions had a deadline of April 22.
“The spirit of this is that we stay true to what the rules are,” Moore said. “That’s the best way for us to serve patients.”
— CNBC’s Brandon Gomez and Angelica Peebles contributed to this report.
Regular worker | Meta, amazon etc.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/tech-careers-job-market-changes-bfe36c1f?st=GN9S7G&reflink=mobilewebshare_permalink
Monday, April 28, 2025
Daily Cover How Alexandr Wang Turned An Army Of Clickworkers Into A $7.3 Billion AI Unicorn
ByKenrick Cai,
Former Staff.
I'm a staff writer covering venture capital, startups and AI.
Apr 11, 2023, 06:15am EDTUpdated Mar 31, 2025, 11:26am EDT
Alexandr Wang briefly became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at 24 by supplying artificial intelligence companies with the one thing they all need: humans. Hundreds of thousands of them. Now his $7.3 billion startup Scale AI is primed to cash in on the biggest AI boom yet—unless someone else can do it better or cheaper.
IN2018, ON A TRIP to his ancestral homeland, Alexandr Wang listened as China’s brightest engineers gave impressive presentations on artificial intelligence. He found it odd that the researchers conspicuously avoided any mention of how AI might be used. Wang, whose immigrant parents were nuclear physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the first atomic bombs were designed, was unsettled.
“They were really dodgy on what the use cases were. You could tell it was for no good,” recalls Wang, the cofounder of Scale AI, who has no second “e” in his first name so that it has eight characters, a number associated with good fortune in Chinese culture. Scale was then an up-and-coming startup providing data services primarily to self-driving auto-makers. But Wang began to worry that AI might soon upend a world order that, excepting the fall of the Soviet Union, has remained mostly stable since World War II. “If you think about the history of humanity, it’s mostly been punctuated by war except the last 80 or so years, which have been unusually peaceful,” he says from Scale’s sixth-floor headquarters in downtown San Francisco, as the occasional (partly) self-driving car zips by below. “A lot of that has been because of American leadership in the world.”
At first glance, Wang, 26, exudes the skittish energy of a fresh college graduate. He listens to “sad girl” musicians like Gracie Abrams and Billie Eilish and dresses “gorpcore,” an in-vogue style of fashionable hiking clothes. He posts Instagram photos with actor Kiernan Shipka of Mad Men fame and spouts pithy nuggets on Twitter: “The best problems can only be solved by blood, sweat, tears, spirit and an overwhelming sense of purpose,” he wrote in one February tweet. At bars, he still gets carded regularly.
None of that matters in Silicon Valley and D.C., where he’s already a power player. His rise began with a bet he made in 2016 to “label” the mass of data required to power AI, primarily for self-driving cars. Someone needed to train the AI to know the difference between a paper bag and a pedestrian. He cornered that market and put Scale in a good position in another sector: generative AI. It was a prescient move that helped him garner a client list that includes the biggest names in AI—and the U.S. government.
“We’re the picks and shovels in the generative AI gold rush,” he says. It has quickly become a lucrative business for Scale, which says it pulled in $250 million in revenue last year, at a time when many AI startups aren’t yet making a cent. Its tech has been used by the government to analyze satellite imagery in Ukraine and by OpenAI to create ChatGPT, the bot that rocked the world with its ability to answer trivia and write poetry. Bret Taylor, former co-CEO of cloud software giant Salesforce, likens Scale’s rise to that of cloud computing darlings Snowflake and Datadog. Former Amazon consumer boss Jeff Wilke, one of Wang’s most trusted advisors, takes an even more enthusiastic view: Scale could become the Amazon Web Services of AI.
Investors awarded Scale a $7.3 billion valuation in 2021, making Wang the latest Silicon Valley insta-billionaire. But his fortune wasn’t built entirely on silicon. It was also built with a vast outsourced workforce that performs a rudimentary task crucial to AI: labeling the data used to train it. Those people—some 240,000 of them in countries including Kenya, the Philippines and Venezuela—work for Remotasks, a subsidiary Scale doesn’t mention in public marketing materials. In other words, if AI does someday liberate humans from mundane workplace tasks, it will have done so using a legion of workers in the Global South, many of whom are paid less than $1 an hour.
“They’re very, very important to the process of building powerful AI systems,” Wang says of his Remotasks workers.
They’re also, increasingly, an ethical concern, with worries emerging about substandard working conditions and low pay. Meanwhile, competitors see Scale as a house of cards that has suffered layoffs and declining value on secondary markets in the past year that has stripped Wang of billionaire status. (Those markets now value his 15% stake at $630 million. Scale argues it’s worth closer to $890 million.) “Scale markets itself as a technology company,” says Manu Sharma, cofounder of rival startup Labelbox. “For us, they’re no different than any business-process outsourcing company.” Tech upstarts think they can do what Scale does better, while traditional outsourcers think they can do it cheaper.
“I would say that we’ve been working on this problem longer and have built more technology than anyone else,” Wang counters. He’s trying to follow Amazon’s playbook of managing the entire chain, from warehouses to shipping. For Scale, that means both the machines—which are increasingly automating the data work—and the human army, which is growing ever larger. “We’re always going to want a human in the loop,” he says.
BEFORE COLLEGE, Wang moved to the Bay Area to work for internet startup Quora, where CEO Adam D’Angelo gave him a crucial piece of advice: Four years of college is overrated, two is underrated. In the end, Wang spent just one year at MIT before heading to storied startup accelerator Y Combinator. There he teamed up with Quora alum Lucy Guo, another dropout, to start Scale in 2016. He remembers being “ridiculously young” at the time, just 19. “But I was just like, ‘Yeah, I know how to code. We’re going to go do this thing.’ ”
As it was first conceived, Scale was to be a one-stop shop for supplying human labor to perform tasks that could not be done by algorithms—essentially, the antithesis of AI. Accel partner Dan Levine was early to see its potential, offering the pair a seed investment of $4.5 million (and his basement as temporary headquarters) in July 2016. Within months, Wang and Guo realized Scale was a viable solution to a problem plaguing the self-driving car companies at AI’s then-frontier: They had millions of miles of on-the-road driving footage with which to train their autonomous vehicle AI, and not nearly enough people to review and label it. Scale could fill that need.
In 2018, Wang and Guo were named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in enterprise technology. Guo subsequently left the company “due to differences in product vision and road map,” she says. “I think Alex has done a great job continuing to run the company.” Guo otherwise declined to comment for this story, and Wang declined to speak about their split.
Investor Mike Volpi first heard Scale’s name during a 2018 board meeting for autonomous vehicle (AV) startup Aurora. “Who?” he remembers asking. Scale’s data labeling service had become crucial for Aurora, he learned, just as it had for Uber and for General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary, Cruise. Volpi persuaded his firm, Index Ventures, to lead an $18 million investment in Scale that August, when its revenue was still shy of $3 million.
The AV wager was becoming a cash cow. Scale’s client list now included major international auto manufacturers such as Toyota and Honda, as well as Silicon Valley behemoths like Google AV subsidiary Waymo, according to a June 2019 fundraising pitch deck seen by Forbes. An account with Apple’s secretive self-driving unit alone was bringing in more than $10 million, the document said, putting annual revenue on track to surpass $40 million. (Scale declined to comment on the deck.)
When Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund made a $100 million investment that minted Scale as a Silicon Valley unicorn in August 2019, it kicked off a 20-month, $580 million fundraising spree, the final round of which valued the company north of $7 billion. It had taken Wang, then 24, just five years to become the youngest self-made billionaire in the world.
BYTHE TIME Scale dominated the data labeling market for self-driving car companies, its name had become something of an irony. The more it scaled, the harder it became to keep up with the demand for human labor. Wang first turned to outsourcing agencies to fill gaps, but costs quickly spiraled. Gross margins, which hovered at about 65% in early 2018, approached a mere 30% by the fourth quarter. Wang needed to stanch the bleeding while still capturing both the human and machine sides of the AI data training supply chain.
Enter Remotasks, Scale’s in-house outsourcing agency. Created in 2017, Remotasks soon became a priority as the company’s AV business skyrocketed. In need of cheap labor, Scale set up a dozen-plus facilities in Southeast Asia and Africa to train thousands of data labelers. By mid-2019, Scale’s margins had recovered to 69%, according to the deck.
Scale has been careful to position Remotasks as a separate brand. Its website makes no mention of Remotasks; the reverse is also true. Early employees say this was done to make Scale’s strategy less obvious to competitors and shield the company from scrutiny. Scale told Forbes it separated the two brands for client confidentiality.
In a 2022 study into working conditions on 15 digital labor platforms, University of Oxford researchers concluded Remotasks met the “minimum standards of fair work” in just two of 10 criteria, flunking equitable pay—which early employees say is pennies per hour on average—and fair representation. They noted that the “obfuscation” of its association with Scale creates confusion that “can contribute to workers’ vulnerability to exploitation.” Lead researcher Kelle Howson compared data labelers on digital labor services like Remotasks to garment factory workers in many of the same countries. “There is pretty much zero accountability for those working conditions,” she added. Scale says it is committed to paying workers “a living wage.”
Beyond the ethical considerations, there are business questions, too. What Scale is doing with Remotasks isn’t hard to replicate. Kevin Guo, cofounder of Hive, a startup that once fielded its own Remotasks rival before shuttering it due to tough margins, contends that the sort of data labeling Scale does is a commodity business. “Anyone who puts up a team can compete with you, and it comes down to price really quickly,” he says.
WHILE REMOTASKS’ huge overseas workforce is critical to Scale’s private sector success, it’s a nonstarter for the company’s other focus: defense contracts with the U.S. government, which is unlikely to share classified data with foreign labelers. Wang is therefore building a much more expensive domestic AI army. Last year, Scale opened an office in St. Louis and announced plans to hire 200 people, many as data labelers.
“There’s two things I deeply believe,” Wang says. “One, AI is a huge force for good, and it needs to be applied as broadly as possible. Two, we need to make sure that America is in a leadership position.”
So far Scale has made $60.6 million from such contracts, according to a government database. The company touted a $249 million award in a press release last year—but the Defense Department told Forbes it is one of more than 70 companies eligible for the money. Scale has so far received one contract capped at $15 million and no payouts have materialized yet. The lion’s share of government spending on AI is still going to the likes of Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, not Silicon Valley upstarts.
“Those companies, they’re really not that cutting-edge when it comes to understanding generative AI,” Wang says. For him, government partnership is a long game. The U.S. government has already used Scale’s expertise to make strategic sense of satellite imagery in Ukraine. And that’s just the beginning. Generative AI, he says, could someday be used more comprehensively. Train a custom AI model on live data from America’s 1.3 million active service personnel and you might just change the nature of war.
But it won’t be easy to get there. Generative AI models require far more complex training than their precursors. They too need additional human help, but instead of simply labeling data harvested from the internet, people need to create it. For AI to explain why puppies are cute in a way that sounds right to the human ear, you need people to train it using natural phrasing. “Human-annotated data turns out to be extraordinarily impactful to model performance,” says Aidan Gomez, cofounder of Cohere, a Toronto-based OpenAI competitor that counts Scale as its primary custom data provider.
Not all AI companies are sold on Scale. OpenAI, for example, relies on Scale’s human labelers but opts to use its own software to manage the data, says cofounder Wojciech Zaremba. Three engineering leaders who used Scale at prominent AI startups told Forbes confidentially that they have concerns about the quality of its human-made AI training data. One described a text-based generative AI model that was hampered by the labelers’ poor English. “Their data quality can be high, but also that’s not a given,” said another. Said a Scale spokesperson: “We stand behind our products and [their] results.”
Alternatives are emerging. San Francisco–based Surge AI, which debuted in 2020, offers data labeling tools and specifically targets AI companies. OpenAI, along with upcoming AI heavies Cohere and Adept, use both Scale and Surge. Then there are billion-dollar Bay Area labeling startups Labelbox and Snorkel AI, which focus on bringing AI to non-tech enterprises.
In January, Scale slashed 20% of its full-time staff. Wang cited “uncertainty” in market conditions. “We increased head count assuming the massive growth would continue,” he wrote in a blog post. Shares of the company are currently trading on private secondary markets at a 42% discount to the last funding round in July 2021.
Scale’s stakeholders remain confident Wang can keep the company ahead of its rivals. “He didn’t get to where he is because he’s a boy genius—MIT pumps out a lot of teenage dropouts,” says William Hockey, the centimillionaire cofounder of $8 billion fintech Plaid, who sits on Scale’s board. “He has an absolutely insane work ethic like nobody I’ve ever met.”
Scale recently signed a strategic partnership with consulting giant Accenture, which plans to use its services to help hundreds of companies build custom AI apps and models. And with nearly a quarter-million human labelers, Remotasks is still growing, Wang confirms. All this growth comes down to what he views as Scale’s ultimate purpose: playing a role in maintaining America’s AI supremacy.
“We’re in an era of great power competition,” he says. “American leadership—I don’t want to say it’s at risk, but it’s never been more important for us to retain that.”
Update: This story has been updated to reflect Plaid’s most recent valuation, to clarify the nature of Scale’s usage in Ukraine and with details of a government contract from the Defense Department.
Daily Cover This AI Founder Has Unseated Taylor Swift As The World’s Youngest Self-Made Woman Billionaire
Apr 17, 2025, 06:30am EDTUpdated Apr 25, 2025, 11:13am EDT
Despite leaving years ago, Scale AI's 30-year-old cofounder has become the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world by holding onto her stake in the company.
WITH RICHARD NIEVA
Buzzy artificial intelligence company Scale AI is wrapping up a tender offer that allows early employees and investors in the nine-year-old private company to sell shares to new or returning investors. The deal, which one source said will “go ahead provided the sky doesn’t fall down” and is slated to be completed by June 1, values the AI company at $25 billion, according to several people familiar with the offer. That’s an 80% jump since last May, when it raised $1 billion at a $13.8 billion valuation. (Business Insider was the first to report the news of the tender offer in late March.)
The new valuation makes Lucy Guo, the 30-year-old cofounder of Scale AI, the youngest self-made woman billionaire on the planet. Guo unseats pop star Taylor Swift, 35, who has held that title since Forbes declared her a billionaire in late 2023.
Guo, a computer science college dropout, cofounded artificial intelligence firm Scale AI in 2016–when she was 21–with Alexandr Wang, who was then 19. Wang became CEO and Guo ran the operations and product design teams at the San Francisco startup. The cofounders both made Forbes’ Under 30 list in 2018. That same year, the pair disagreed about how the company was being run, and Wang reportedly fired Guo. “We had a difference of opinion but I am proud of what Scale AI has accomplished,” Guo says in a statement.
After leaving Scale AI, she astutely held on to most of her stake in the company while pursuing her next startup. Guo still owns an estimated stake of just under 5% of Scale AI worth nearly $1.2 billion; she won’t comment on whether she is selling any of her stake as part of the tender offer. Add in her other assets–including her holding in her second startup, Passes–and she’s worth $1.25 billion, Forbes estimates. “I don’t really think about it much, it’s a bit wild. Too bad it’s all on paper haha,” says Guo via text in response to her new billionaire status.
The bump in Scale’s value also lifts the fortune of the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, CEO Alexandr Wang, to an estimated $3.6 billion, up from $2 billion. A spokesperson for Scale AI declined to comment.
Guo is one of just six self-made women billionaires on the planet under the age of 40. She’s also the only one who’s made the bulk of her fortune from a company she left years ago.
The daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, Guo grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and began coding while in middle school. She studied computer science and human-computer interactions at Carnegie Mellon University, but dropped out before graduating to become a Thiel Fellow– a program sponsored by billionaire investor Peter Thiel to pay entrepreneurial college-age students to create companies. In 2015, Guo got a job as a product designer at question-and-answer firm Quora, where she met Wang. She left Quora and worked briefly at Snapchat doing product design before she and Wang decided to cofound Scale AI in 2016.
The company essentially does what Wang has called “the picks and shovels” work, labeling the data required to power AI. Scale started out by paying low wages to contract workers who labeled images needed to train the AI for self-driving cars. Customers grew to include the U.S. government–Scale’s tech has been used to analyze satellite images in Ukraine–and OpenAI, for help in training ChatGPT.
After Guo left Scale, she started a small venture capital firm called Backend Capital to invest in early stage companies. One of its best investments: a six-figure bet in 2020 on financial software firm Ramp–a company now valued at $13 billion (all three of its cofounders are now billionaires).
Then, in 2022, she shifted her focus away from the VC firm to start her own business called Passes, which is similar to Patreon and OnlyFans, a platform for creators and celebrities to connect with fans, who pay for online chats and videos. Passes signed deals with celebrities including gymnast Olivia Dunne, basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal and DJ Kygo. Guo raised $50 million over three rounds from 2022 to 2024 from investors like Mary Meeker’s Bond Capital, talent agent Michael Ovitz and Menlo Ventures, valuing the company at $150 million.
Last month Passes was hit with a lawsuit accusing the company of hosting child sexual assault material (CSAM). As Forbes reported in March, right before the suit was filed, Passes banned all underage creators and purged the site of their content. A spokesperson for Passes told Forbes last week that it “refutes any claims that it approved or condoned the posting of underage explicit content on its platform. Any effort to attribute alleged misconduct of third parties to Passes is baseless and nothing more than an effort to entangle Passes and its founder, Lucy Guo, in the lawsuit.”
In addition to spending long hours at work, Guo is religious about her daily workouts at gym chain Barry’s Bootcamp. In early April she posted on Instagram “Discipline > Sleep. 3000 classes complete” below a photo of her at Barry’s in West Hollywood holding a sign that read “Lucy Hiits 3000!” Her other favorite thing to post: photos from music festivals like Coachella and the recent Ultra Music Festival in Miami. It’s a mix of work and fun that never ends. Last weekend, Passes threw a big bash tied to the Coachella Music Festival, which started on Friday, April 11. Said Guo via text from Los Angeles, where she now lives, “Quite literally thousands of RSVPs.”
Additional reporting by Iain Martin
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