Edwin Chen (born 1987 or 1988) is an American billionaire businessman, and the founder and CEO of Surge AI.
Biography Born circa 1988,"Los nuevos dueños de Silicon Valley: los 40 jóvenes 'self-made' más ricos del mundo", Matt Durot, January 13, 2026, Forbes Argentina Chen is the son of Taiwanese immigrants to the US His parents ran a Chinese-Thai-American restaurant in the small town of Crystal River, Florida,"Edwin Chen", Cass Almendral, May 26, 2026, Social Life Magazine and Chen worked at the family restaurant before his boarding school education as a teenager. He studied mathematics, computer science and linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He graduated MIT"Forbes Self-Made 250: The Greatest Living Self-Made Americans", Alex Knapp, April 09, 2026, Forbes in 2008."Linguistics News", September 17, 2025, MIT News
He joined Twitter in late 2011,"Twitter Data Scientist Takes on McDonald’s Entire Menu, Survives", Christopher Mims, March 22, 2012, MIT Technology Review becoming a data scientist."Twitter Uses Army of Low-Paid Workers To Manually Sort Hashtags For Advertisers", January 10, 2013, Business Insider He oversaw Twitter's spam and health metrics."Documents detail plans to gut Twitter’s workforce", Elizabeth Dwoskin, Faiz Siddiqui, Gerrit De Vynck and Jeremy B. Merrill, October 20, 2022, The Washington Post He worked as a machine-learning engineer at Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Google, and Peter Thiel's hedge fund Clarium, before starting Surge AI. In 2020,"‘I hired a million of the world’s smartest people to fact-check AI’", Danny Fortson, December 20, 2025, The Sunday Times he relocated from Silicon Valley to Manhattan to found Surge AI as a data-labeling firm, using several million dollars saved from tech jobs as startup funds."37-year-old MIT techie joins the Forbes 400 list with AI fortune, says AI could write 'Nobel Prize-winning poetry': Who is Edwin Chen?", September 25, 2025, The Economic Times As of July 2025, his company provided AI developers such as Google and OpenAI with human contractors to train MLMs."An AI Startup Bootstrapped Its Way to $1 Billion in Revenue. Should VCs Be Nervous? Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen says he doesn’t like the tradeoffs that come with outside investment", Brian Contreras, July 15, 2025, Inc.
In 2025, he was named on of the 100 Most Influential People in AI by TIME. In September 2025, Forbes ranked him as the wealthiest new entry onto the Forbes 400. He remained the CEO and majority owner of Surge AI."These 14 Billionaires Joined The Forbes 400 List In 2025", September 09, 2025, Forbes At the time, Forbes estimated his net worth at US$18 billion, because of his c.75% stake in Surge AI. He lives in Manhattan, New York City.
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