The man set to become one of the world’s youngest artificial intelligence billionaires started his entrepreneurial journey as a bored preteen living in Los Angeles.

When Ali Ansari was 12, living with his family in a single room at his aunt’s house in Woodland Hills, his immigrant mother told him to stop wasting time staring at his phone and try making money with it.

He took his father’s loafers and listed them on eBay for $50.

“My dad was like, ‘Why the hell did you sell my shoes?’ ” Ansari said. “My mom was like, excited.”

While it was a bad deal for his dad, Ansari learned the thrill of making money. He has been chasing it ever since.

He started biking around his neighborhood, visiting garage sales and thrift stores, buying whatever he could carry to sell online.

Through middle school, high school, and college in California, he continued to build online businesses, launching an AI business in his 20s that could make him a billionaire this year, his 25th.

His hard hustle in his young years is paying off more than he could have imagined. The success has given him the freedom to buy his parents a house and a nice car. He has been featured in the news and gets recognized by people in the business.

But the main change from his success so far, he says, is a huge increase in the amount of work and responsibility he has to shoulder.

“I feel very grateful and very stressed,” he said. “That kind of summarizes it.”

Ansari’s AI company is called Micro1. Making AI smarter requires vast amounts of data, as well as training and testing. Micro1 recruits and manages thousands of human experts — coders, lawyers, doctors, professors and financial analysts — to gather expert information that is fed to AI models like ChatGPT. These experts review and correct the AI’s output, making it more accurate.

Micro1 is one of the key suppliers of that kind of expert human assistance for AI, alongside California competitors Scale AI, Surge and Mercor.

Micro1 went from $4 million in annualized revenue in 2024 to $200 million today, according to Ansari. Even by Silicon Valley standards, that’s a meteoric rise.

Forbes estimates that Ansari is on the verge of becoming a billionaire, based on ongoing funding conversations that value Micro1 at $2.5 billion. Micro1 was last valued at $500 million.

Ansari has a booming voice, a fashionable buzz cut and a meticulously maintained beard. He’s fast with his fingers, usually responding immediately to text despite all he is juggling. He has the confidence of someone older, though his frequent use of the word “like” in conversation marks him as Gen Z.

His startup is based in Palo Alto and during monthly visits to Los Angeles, he works out of a coworking space in Woodland Hills — minutes away from his family, high school and the memories of his many teenage side hustles.

Ali Ansari is the cofounder of Micro1, a company that recruits and manages thousands of human experts to help train AI.

(Paul Kuroda/For The Times)

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“This area is my entire childhood,” he said, gesturing out the window from his Woodland Hills office during an interview at the coworking space.

Ansari’s family emigrated to the U.S. when he was 10, after winning the rare U.S. green card lottery. Before the move, they had a comfortable life in a small beach town in northern Iran, where his father owned a kitchen cabinet factory.

Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, Iran has witnessed multiple waves of middle-class exodus, where Iranian immigrants moved to the U.S to escape economic collapse and persecution. The growing presence of the Persian diaspora in Westwood earned it the moniker Tehrangeles.

The family of four shared a single room at a relative’s house for the first year. His mother took a job at Target for a short time. The transition was rough for Ansari, who wasn’t fluent in English and often got in trouble for fooling around in school.

“Teachers would call my mom, and they’d be like, ‘Hey, your son’s making like, cow noises again’ or something,” he said.

At 14, he started reselling textbooks because they were easier to carry in his backpack. He figured out that procuring a steady supply of books through garage sales was hard, so he developed Cash Books Now, a website for college students to sell their textbooks. He would list them on Amazon at a 50% markup.

Buying and selling textbooks became his obsession. His bedroom wall was divided into two sections: “not listed” and “listed” to track inventory. By 16, Ansari had sold more than $100,000 in books.

“I would focus on this way more than school,” he said. “It was like the main hustle.”

In high school, he started a tutoring business that he later sold. In 2019, Ansari enrolled at UC Berkeley and started a software agency to build websites for small businesses.

Recruiting engineers to build the websites was taking up too much of his time, so he built an AI screening tool to help him with interviews. This later became Micro1, and his screening tool was used to track down, weed out and test all kinds of experts for training AI.

Still, the road to success was not without its rough patches. After raising $2 million in 2023, Ansari had a panic attack during a trip to visit his team in India.

“I kept kind of repeating this idea in my head, which was, like, some people have decided to give me millions of dollars,” he said. “And now I have this duty to really do something good with it.”

He got through it with the help of his family and reading, and has matured enough now to manage anxiety and lead with confidence.

“I am more composed than ever, and I frankly feel less anxious than ever,” he said.

Micro1’s annualized revenues surged more than 30-fold last year to $150 million. In early 2026, it crossed $200 million.

It has built a global workforce of contractors with various skills: from coders and comedians, to doctors and lawyers, to teach their skills to AI.

Ansari says leading such a fast-growing company at the heart of the hottest tech sector feels like being in a constant battle trying to meet demand, raise money and “punch back” against competitors trying to poach his employees.

He says he doesn’t have any hobbies besides work. He doesn’t watch television or movies but he devours business podcasts and personal stories of entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk.

Ansari is still adapting to the newfound fame and responsibilities. As the company’s valuation has climbed, Ansari bought his family a house in Woodland Hills. He recently hired a chief of staff to help with family and professional matters.

“I’m constantly choosing what I spend my time on, and it’s become the most difficult thing,” he said.

For future growth, Ansari is betting that demand for human training data will grow. He recently expanded Micro1 into robotics, recruiting roughly 1,000 people across 60 countries to record footage of themselves performing household tasks. The footage will be used to train robotic systems.

Ansari predicts that in the long run, human data will become a $1-trillion market — a projection he derives from the assumption that roughly 5% of all human labor will eventually be redirected toward training AI systems.

On a recent visit home, his father told him he should diversify into robots. When Ansari told him Micro1 had already started doing that, his father complained.

The man whose loafer launched an empire wanted a piece of the action this time.

“You stole my idea,” his father joked. “You got to give me equity.”

The young Ansari hopes his success will uplift more than just his family.

“I might [become] the youngest Persian billionaire in the world,” he said. “I think I’ll inspire a lot of other Iranians, which kind of feels weird to say.”

Olympic gold medals haven’t been actual gold for over a century. The last solid, 24-karat gold medal to be awarded was at the 1912 Games in Stockholm, according to the International Olympic Committee.

Since then, they’ve been mostly made up of silver — with six grams of thin gold plating on the outside.

But especially as the prices of gold and other metals have jumped recently, those six grams make a big difference.

As of Feb. 6, gold was trading at $4,889 an ounce — up 70 percent from its price a year ago. It’s about double what it was worth during the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Silver was trading at $77 an ounce — up 138 percent from a year ago, and almost triple what it was worth during the 2024 Olympics.

The values of gold and silver have soared over the last year — silver rose 60 percent in January 2026 alone — as investors seek safe places to park their money during heightened geopolitical turmoil and worries about inflation.

Olympic athletes don’t compete to resell their medals, and most are in the Games for the prestige the medals represent.

The movements in the precious metal markets in the run-up to this year’s Games in Italy, however, have drawn new attention to the real value of the athletes’ accomplishment.

Even with volatility in recent days — both metals plunged in value last week, as analysts speculated that the prices had become overvalued — gold and silver medals are worth well over twice what they were worth at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Tesla, the 23-year-old company that brought green cars into the mainstream, has been pushed off its perch as the world’s top electric vehicle seller.

Chinese EV manufacturer BYD sold hundreds of thousands more cars last year, and it’s not just in China.

In most of the countries where the Chinese titan went head-to-head with Tesla — including Germany, Mexico, Thailand and Australia — Tesla lost market share at an unprecedented rate.

The end of federal support for EVs has bitten into Tesla’s sales in the U.S., while backlash against Chief Executive Elon Musk’s political posturing has damaged his company’s reputation both at home and abroad. Globally, BYD is dominating with newer models, better batteries and lower sticker prices.

“Tesla didn’t just lose its sales crown, it squandered its position as a leader,” said Paul Blokland, co-founder of automotive data company Segment Y Automotive Intelligence. “As the U.S. industry retreats behind a wall of tariffs and abandoned EV plans, Asia has taken the torch.”

In one of the most extreme examples of Tesla getting trumped, BYD vehicles swarmed roads in Europe last year. The Chinese company’s sales in the top 10 European markets quadrupled in 2025 compared with the previous year, according to calculations from Segment Y. Tesla sales slumped 30% over the same period.

As Tesla loses global market share, Musk has been trying to diversify Tesla away from its EV roots and rebrand it as more of an AI, robotics and robotaxi company.

On Tesla’s earnings call last month, Musk announced he would end production of the Model S and Model X and use the freed-up factory space to produce Optimus humanoid robots. He said he hopes to produce 1 million robots a year at the production plant in Fremont.

“It’s time to basically bring the Model S and X programs to an end with an honorable discharge because we’re really moving into a future that is based on autonomy,” Musk said on the call.

BYD was founded in 1995 in Shenzhen, China, starting out as a maker of low-cost rechargeable batteries for consumer electronics, eventually supplying Motorola, Nokia and others.

BYD has now emerged as a global electric-vehicle heavyweight by controlling much of its supply chain and rapidly rolling out new models. An early investment from Berkshire Hathaway helped legitimize the company abroad. As BYD expanded sales across China, Europe and other overseas markets, it has been reshaping competition in the auto industry everywhere it lands.

Due to steep tariffs and federal restrictions, you can’t buy a BYD passenger vehicle in the U.S. But according to experts and customers, BYD offers a higher-quality car for a much lower price in other countries. The BYD Dolphin, an all-electric hatchback, starts at less than $14,000 in China.

Experts said BYD has several advantages over Tesla, including a more diverse product offering, lower-cost access to rare-earth metals used in batteries, and no safety and labor laws like those in the U.S.

“High visibility elements of BYD cars seem to be superior to not just Teslas but a lot of the cars that are being produced by non-Chinese companies,” said Karl Brauer, an analyst at iSeeCars.com. “Musk has got to find another concept to build his legacy on.”

Tesla offers a few main vehicles with some variation, including a compact car, a midsize SUV and the Cybertruck. BYD sells more than eight models that include sedans, several SUVs, minivans and trucks.

In countries where there is a choice between Tesla and BYD, customers say BYD cars look better, cost less and come with more options.

Amy de Groot, a resident of Melbourne, bought her BYD Sealion 6 about a year ago for around 55,000 Australian dollars. She said BYD vehicles are all over the roads in her community.

“Everyone that gets into the car is dead shocked at how nice it is,” De Groot said. “It’s a beautiful car to look at and to be inside.”

When she was shopping for an electric vehicle, De Groot didn’t give much thought to buying a Tesla. Teslas peaked in popularity in Australia about five years ago, she estimated, but Musk’s reputation has significantly deteriorated since then, she said.

“At the time that I was looking, the Tesla stocks bombed really hard, and resale is always top of mind for me,” De Groot said. “It was a real fad to have a Tesla, and I just don’t think that they’re competitive in any way.”

According to Segment Y Automotive Intelligence, BYD sold more than 52,000 electric vehicles in Australia in 2025, a 156% increase from the year prior. Tesla sales in the country fell 24%.

Even in California, where electric vehicles are extremely popular and BYD is nowhere to be found, Tesla is losing market share.

The number of new Teslas registered in California fell more than 11% from 2024 to 2025. Tesla’s market share among EVs in the state fell 5 percentage points over the same period, according to recent data from the California Auto Outlook. American automaker Chevrolet and Honda, a Japanese manufacturer, both gained market share at the same time.

“The scrapping of incentives no doubt impacted Tesla, but at least it does not have to worry about BYD in its own backyard yet,” Blokland said.

One of BYD’s competitive edges, analysts say, is its batteries. It started as a battery company and has developed batteries that are more affordable and powerful than those made by the competition.

Another factor is that battery materials are cheaper to source in China, said Brauer with iSeeCars.com.

“When the most expensive part of an electric car is the battery, and you have a massive advantage on the cost of producing a battery, you have a massive advantage in the EV world,” he said.

BYD may also be getting some help from government backing as well as lower labor costs, experts say.

“Our rules and environmental regulations and our laws about how you treat workers are not globally instituted,” said Brian Moody, an automotive expert and analyst. “It seems to give BYD a financial advantage in that they can charge next to nothing for a car that maybe costs more than that to build.”

While BYD vehicles are not expected to land in the U.S. anytime soon due to trade and safety restrictions, they are increasingly going to be found just across the border.

More than 75,000 BYDs were sold in Mexico last year, according to Segment Y’s tally. Meanwhile, Canada recently reached a trade agreement with China that would allow more Chinese EVs into the country.