A recent Observer article highlights that many of today’s top A.I. companies were built by founders whose stories began outside the U.S. Together, the 12 founders on the list lead companies worth at least $470 billion. Elon Musk, born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971, moved to Canada at age 17 and later to the U.S., becoming a citizen in 2002. He helped launch OpenAI in 2015, left in 2018, and later sued OpenAI; that case has since been dismissed. In 2023, Musk founded xAI, which launched the ChatGPT rival Grok; the company, worth $250 billion, is now part of SpaceX. Ali Ghodsi, born in Tehran in 1978, fled Iran with his family as a child and grew up in Sweden. He moved to the U.S. in 2009 as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founded Databricks in 2013. Databricks’ “lakehouse” platform helps companies organize and manage data for A.I. systems.