Business
AI’s latest 20-something billionaire got his start at L.A. garage sales
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.
Ali Ansari generates the training data that makes AI models like ChatGPT and Claude smarter.
(Paul Kuroda/For The Times)
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)
“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.”
Airbnb unveiled a new set of services for guests on Wednesday, adding car rentals, airport pickup and grocery delivery to its online marketplace that connects travelers with local hosts.
Customers can now get groceries delivered to their Airbnb through a partnership with Instacart and have a driver meet them at the airport with Airbnb’s Welcome Pickups. The app is also offering luggage storage in partnership with Bounce and will add in-app car rentals later this summer.
At the same time, Airbnb is ramping up its use of AI by adding AI-powered review summaries and lodging comparisons, the company said.
The company has been expanding beyond lodging since last year, when it introduced Airbnb Experiences and Services, giving guests the option to book private tours and chef-cooked meals through the app.
In an earnings call earlier this month, the company’s chief executive, Brian Chesky, said the company is at “the very, very beginning of how AI is going to change how we all do our jobs.”
The changes are coming in time for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which will take place in 16 cities across the U.S., Mexico and Canada. The company said its offering exclusive World Cup experiences, such as watch parties and access to stadiums.
“In terms of what we’ve seen in cumulative bookings heading into the event, the World Cup is slated to be the largest event in Airbnb’s history,” said the company’s chief financial officer, Ellie Mertz, on the earnings call.
Airbnb gained popularity for offering travelers unique and homey stays on other people’s property, but it added boutique hotel bookings to its platform late last year. The move had some customers questioning if the app was straying too far from its original purpose.
In its announcement this week, the company said it is partnering with more independent hotels in 20 top destinations, including New York, London and Singapore. On the earnings call, Chesky said hotels on Airbnb could become a multibillion-dollar revenue business.
The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2007 and gave homeowners the opportunity to earn money by renting out their space to travelers seeking something different from a hotel. Airbnb bookings can range from private bedrooms in a shared home to luxury mansions and yachts.
The company’s revenue grew 18% year over year to $2.7 billion in the first quarter, while net income increased slightly to $160 million. Airbnb’s new services and offerings could transform it from a home-sharing platform to a holistic travel marketplace, analysts said.
Shares of the company have increased by 14% over the past six months and fell by less than 1% on Thursday.
Elon Musk wants to take investors on a ride to the moon — and beyond.
His pioneering rocket company SpaceX filed Wednesday for what’s expected to be the largest initial public offering in history, potentially raising at least $75 billion and valuing the company at as much as $2 trillion.
The registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an expected public offering next month explicitly sets aside stocks for retail investors, though the exact number will be spelled out in a later filing, as will the offering price and company valuation.
Interest in the stock offering is expected to be high despite the billionaire’s controversial politics, including his involvement last year with the Department of Government Efficiency, the makeshift cost-cutting effort that resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of government jobs.
“Potential investors are probably just as polarized as the electorate is too, given his dabbling in politics,” said Carol Schleif, chief market strategist for BMO Private Wealth. “But it’s not just the SpaceX IPO per se, it’s a bigger, broader excitement among investors for space investment in general.”
Investor interest was piqued by the Artemis II moon mission this year that SpaceX did not participate in, she said. However, the company is expected to play a larger role in future missions that take astronauts to the moon..
Ultimately, Musk, 54, wants to establish a colony on Mars but those plans have been set on the back burner, with NASA now focusing on moon missions.
Musk will remain the company’s chief executive and chairman. Under a dual-class stock structure as a holder of special Class B shares he will be able to control the election of directors, the filing says.
The IPO is expected to be at least twice as large as the current record holder: Saudi Aramco, the state-controlled national oil and gas company of Saudi Arabia, which raised nearly $30 billion in 2019.
Nearly two dozen banks will be underwriting the IPO and offering shares to investors, including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Citigroup.
Founded in 2002 in El Segundo, SpaceX has revolutionized the aerospace industry by developing the reusable Falcon 9 rocket that has radically lowered launch costs.
The company moved its headquarters from Hawthorne to Texas in 2024. However, SpaceX retains large operations in the South Bay city and blasts off regularly from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.
Scores of former SpaceX employees have launched startups in Southern California, including rocket company Relativity Space, hypersonic missile startup Castelion and satellite manufacturer Apex Space.
Since developing its reusable rocket technology, SpaceX has established its Starlink network as the leading satellite-based broadband internet service. It also is moving into satellite-based cellular service and this year merged with Musk’s xAi artificial intelligence company that also included his X social network.
Marco Cáceres, an aerospace analyst at Teal Group, said that the advantage of going public for SpaceX lies in the IPO’s ability to raise a large amount of capital quickly to complete development of its Starship rocket.
“It is going to dominate the market even more than the Falcon 9 is dominating the market now,” he said. “That’s going to be ultimately what’s going to drive their business for the next 10 years.”
The 12th test launch of Starship is set for Friday from the company’s south Texas launch facility. The rocket is the third version of craft, standing more than 400 feet tall and with about three times the payload of the second version.
The regulatory filing claims that the market for its rocket, internet and mobile telephone businesses could be as large as $28.5 trillion.
SpaceX also plans to launch thousands of orbiting data centers powered by the sun that would perform AI calculations.
With the company making massive capital investments, it recorded a $4.28-billion loss in the first quarter. Last year, it recorded $18.7 billion in revenue and lost $4.94 billion, according to the filing.
The public offering is expected to hit the market next month after a “road show,” during which SpaceX will seek to drum up interest from institutional and retail investors.
It will arrive after a fairly quiet year for IPOs that was brightened last week when Cerebras Systems, a Sunnyvale company that makes semiconductors for AI supercomputers, went public.
Shares at Cerebras were offered at $185 and jumped 68% on its opening day. They closed Wednesday at $290.69.
Matt Kennedy, a senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, said the SpaceX offering would dwarf that of Cerebras, as it is expected to raise more than every IPO combined in the last two years.
“A win here or a loss could really impact the IPO market,” he said. “The sheer size of this deal is going to make or lose fortunes.”
Among the oddest disclosures of the IPO is a decision by the company’s board in January to grant Musk 1 billion Class B shares if the company reaches a certain market capitalization and establishes a “permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.”
Erewhon opened its newest location in Glendale on Wednesday, marking the luxury grocer’s 14th store in Southern California with more set to open soon.
The new store, located at 520 N. Glendale Ave., includes the chain’s signature cafe and tonic bar as well as an indoor-outdoor patio space.
Known for its upscale, trendy products and high prices, Erewhon has grown into a tourist destination in Los Angeles and a hot spot for celebrities and influencers.
The Glendale location will bring Erewhon staples to trendy consumers in the area, including the beloved Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie, which until last year was named after the model Hailey Bieber.
Employees at the store handed out complimentary gift bags and fresh flowers during the grand opening Wednesday morning.
“This location was designed to reflect the spirit of the neighborhood while creating a welcoming space to gather, centered around wellness, connection, and a commitment to the quality standards that define Erewhon,” Erewhon President Josephine Antoci said in a statement.
The company purchased the space, which was formerly a hardware store, in 2024.
Erewhon has locations in several of Southern California’s wealthiest areas, including Calabasas and Beverly Hills. It also has stores in Venice, Manhattan Beach and at the Grove.
“Erewhon’s decision to invest in Glendale reflects confidence in our city’s economic future,” Glendale Mayor Ardashes Kassakhian said in a news release.
The grocer was founded in 1966 by Japanese immigrants Michio and Aveline Kushi — pioneers of the natural-foods macrobiotic movement — who began selling imported organic goods out of their Boston home. In 1969, the company opened its first Los Angeles location on Beverly Boulevard.
Josephine and Tony Antoci bought the company in 2011 and helped launch it to its luxury status with a cult-like following. Tony serves as chief executive while Josephine handpicks much of the store’s merchandise.
By the mid-2010s, Erewhon had become a watering hole for celebrities such as the Kardashians and the Beckhams.
The company has its eye on further expansion. A Thousand Oaks location is slated to open this August and stores in Costa Mesa and downtown Los Angeles are planned for 2027. An Erewhon cafe opened in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new David Geffen Galleries earlier this month.
The Pacific Palisades location, which shut down after the wildfires last year, is set to reopen in January.
The Glendale Erewhon takes the place of Virgil’s Hardware Home Center, which opened in 1932 and closed in 2019.
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