Edwin Chen
American billionaire businessman
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Biography
Born circa 1988,[2] Chen is the son of Taiwanese immigrants to the US[3] His parents ran a Chinese-Thai-American restaurant in the small town of Crystal River, Florida,[4] and Chen worked at the family restaurant before his boarding school education as a teenager.[3] He studied mathematics, computer science and linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[5] He graduated MIT[6] in 2008.[7]
He joined Twitter in late 2011,[8] becoming a data scientist.[9] He oversaw Twitter's spam and health metrics.[10] He worked as a machine-learning engineer at Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Google, and Peter Thiel's hedge fund Clarium, before starting Surge AI.[1] In 2020,[11] 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.[12] As of July 2025, his company provided AI developers such as Google and OpenAI with human contractors to train MLMs.[13]
In 2025, he was named on of the 100 Most Influential People in AI by TIME.[4] 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.[14] At the time, Forbes estimated his net worth at US$18 billion, because of his c.75% stake in Surge AI.[15] He lives in Manhattan, New York City.[16]