Would you trust a 22-year-old AI billionaire with the global economy?

Dec 24, 2025
1 min read

Brendan Foody is 22 years old and runs a company worth billions. This August, I met the young CEO in a glass conference room overlooking the San Francisco Bay. While his peers are searching for their first jobs, Foody is pursuing a “master plan,” as he calls it, to upend the global labor market.

His start-up, Mercor, offers an AI-powered hiring platform: Bots weed through résumés, and even conduct interviews. In the next five years, Foody told me, AI could automate 50 percent of the tasks that people do today. “That will be extremely exciting to see play out,” he said. Humanity will become much more productive, he thinks, allowing us to cure cancer and land on Mars.

Although Foody does not have much by way of conventional work experience, he is already a seasoned entrepreneur. By his account, in middle school, he ran a business reselling Safeway donuts to his classmates at a 400 percent markup.

His success at donut arbitrage made his mom nervous he might try to sell sketchier vices, so she sent him to Catholic school. There, he met his Mercor co-founders.