Posted on 02/07/2026 6:32:51 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
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...
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
So he is creating our assassins!
Good for him.
Better get ready for California’s new billionaire tax.
Going to garage sales and finding worthwhile items that people want and selling it online. Now is doing pretty much the same thing with information. Smart and hard-working 25 year old.
I have been doing that since i retired also trash pick for furniture and i have a few supply houses that trash new stuff all the time
Hmmmm.....12 years old?
I believe eBay requires one to be at least 18 years of age before they can sign up to be a member.
I did that for awhile it was like a treasure hunt every weekend. People toss out more real gold jewelry thinking it is costume then you can believe. They must have bad eyes or lazy.
Any kid who plans on being a successful entrepreneur better be able to figure out how to beat age verification software.
Lol.
The first rule of success—never obey anybody else’s rules.
Laws are for little people.
My brother lived in LA for several decades. I walked him into a warehouse crammed full of used furniture in our hometown. He said “If I could lift this place up and dump it into SoCal, I would never have to work again”. He got more depressed when I told him there was another one across town. Two former manufacturing plants full of OPS (Old People’s Stuff).
I was actually thinking the same thing.
If the kid is smart enough to make money, he’s probably smart enough to fool eBay into thinking he’s older than he actually is.
The ethics of a tech billionaire!
““My dad was like, ‘Why the hell did you sell my shoes?’ ” Ansari said.”
There is this remarkable thing called TRUCKS...
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