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They did it again: three kids from Silicon Valley — Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha — just watched their AI hiring company, Mercor, vault to a reported $10 billion valuation and, by Forbes’ accounting, made them the youngest self-made billionaires in history at age 22. It’s a story the coastal elite will frame as evidence of a new tech meritocracy, but hardworking Americans should look closer at what’s really being rewarded.
Mercor’s rise wasn’t overnight; the company only launched in 2023 and moved through rapid funding rounds, including an earlier Series B that took it to a $2 billion valuation this past February. Venture capital faith in generative AI and human-in-the-loop services explains the buy-in, not some inevitability of destiny — investors chase winners and create winners on paper.
Here’s what conservatives should admire: these founders took risks, left the campus track for the marketplace, and leaned into entrepreneurship rather than credentialism. Two of the trio are Thiel Fellows, a program that funds young people who choose building over bookish credentials, and that willingness to bet on yourself is the free-market spirit America needs more of.
But admiration can and should coexist with skepticism. A jump from a $2 billion valuation in February to reports of a $10 billion price tag after a roughly $350 million round this October smells like the same froth that inflates bubbles — and when valuations are decided by a few deep-pocketed funds, ordinary workers get little say. The celebration of youth wealth should not distract from asking whether this concentration of paper wealth actually creates durable goods, services, or jobs for Main Street.
Don’t kid yourself about the business model: Mercor builds human-powered training and data-labeling pipelines that major AI labs rely on, and its CEO has said the company pays more than $1.5 million a day to tens of thousands of contractors doing that work. That’s a reminder that AI’s backbone is human labor — people teaching machines — and that this new economy often funnels giant fees to platforms and middlemen rather than lifting wages across the board.
That reality cuts both ways. Conservatives should applaud the creation of new kinds of work and the entrepreneurial grit it represents, while also pushing back on a tech culture that treats speculative paper gains as ultimate virtue and tolerates opaque labor practices. If we want innovation that strengthens families and communities, policymakers and private citizens alike must demand transparency, fair contracting, and a system that rewards productive contribution instead of purely financial engineering.
Finally, let’s be clear about who’s backing this: prominent venture firms and well-known angels have been behind Mercor’s trajectory, the same actors who have shaped the tech industry for years. Conservatives should cheer American innovation and the rise of capable young founders, but we should also insist that the next chapter includes accountability to workers, respect for small businesses that compete for talent, and policies that ensure the gains from AI are broadly shared — not just celebrated in Silicon Valley cocktail parties.
