Edwin Chen

Net Worth: $18 Billion

Chinese Name: 黄惠忠

Ancestral Home: Taiwan

Age: 38

Nationality: American

Main Industries: Artificial Intelligence, Technology

Founder and CEO of Surge AI, a data-labeling company he started in 2020 after leaving Twitter. Raised in a small Florida town where his Taiwanese immigrant parents ran a Chinese restaurant, Chen studied math at MIT and worked at Google, Facebook, and Twitter before deciding to solve the problem of obtaining high-quality human-labeled data for AI training. He bootstrapped Surge AI without external funding, and the company reached over $1 billion in revenue by 2024, with clients including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. His fortune is estimated at $18 billion, making him one of the youngest members of the Forbes 400, and he was named to TIME's 2025 list of the 100 most influential people in AI.