Sal Khan

Khan's father, a physician from Bangladesh, died when Khan was thirteen, and money stayed tight afterward: his mother earned 16,000 dollars in 1993, the year he did her taxes himself to make sure she qualified for financial aid. He graduated valedictorian of his New Orleans-area high school in 1994 while already taking college math courses on the side, then went to MIT for a double major in electrical engineering and mathematics plus a master's degree, and to Harvard for an MBA. By 2003 he was a hedge fund analyst in Boston, the standard path for someone with that resume, with no plan yet to leave it.

It started as a favor: in 2004 Khan began tutoring his cousin Nadia in math over the phone and a shared online notepad, and when other relatives asked for the same help he started posting the lessons to YouTube in 2006 so he would not have to repeat himself. The channel grew faster than the finance job did, and in 2009 he quit to build Khan Academy full time, on a free, nonprofit model funded first by the Gates Foundation and then by Google and other donors. The platform now reports more than 150 million registered users, built on a flipped-classroom model where students watch lectures at home and work problems with a teacher present. In 2014 he opened a physical Khan Lab School in Mountain View, and in 2023 added Khanmigo, an AI tutor built on OpenAI's technology.

The mission was always free education for anyone, and the record on delivering it is more complicated than the pitch. Khan has no formal teaching credential, and independent reviewers flagged technical errors in some of his early math and physics videos, prompting Khan Academy to build a network of more than two hundred outside content experts to check the material. The free promise has also frayed at the edges: Khanmigo, the AI tutor launched in 2023, costs four dollars a month for individual users, even as a separate free version goes to teachers. And when the Wall Street Journal tested Khanmigo's math tutoring in 2024, it caught the tool making basic calculation errors — the same kind of mistake the whole platform was built to fix in students.

Khan is forty-nine now, still Khan Academy's founder and chief executive, and the free platform he built as a side project has become closer to educational infrastructure than a startup, with more than 150 million registered accounts and a role, formal since October 2025, advising TED itself on where education and technology go next. He has stayed married to the physician Umaima Marvi since 2004; their oldest son's childhood epilepsy, which Khan has spoken about publicly, resolved as the boy grew older. Two decades after the notepad sessions with his cousin Nadia, the reach is measured in billions of hours of recorded learning, and the argument over how much of it actually works is still open.

Sal Khan's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Khan Academy company
  Incorporated as a nonprofit after his tutoring videos found a wide audience 2008
• The One World Schoolhouse book
  His book on education reform 2012
• Khan Lab School company
  A physical school in Mountain View built on his teaching model 2014
• Khanmigo invention
  An AI tutor built on OpenAI's technology 2023
• Brave New Words book
  On artificial intelligence and education 2024

• October 11, 1976 aged 0 Born in Metairie, Louisiana
• 1990 aged ~14 His father dies Khan was thirteen.
• 1994 aged ~18 Graduates valedictorian of his high school
• 2004 aged ~28 Begins tutoring his cousin Nadia remotely
• November 16, 2006 aged 30 Creates the Khan Academy YouTube channel
• 2009 aged ~33 Quits his hedge fund job to run Khan Academy full time
• 2014 aged ~38 Opens Khan Lab School in Mountain View, California
• 2023 aged ~47 Launches Khanmigo, an AI tutor

• Bill Gates b. 1955
  Co-founder of Microsoft who, through the Gates Foundation, has donated billions to global health and education. an early major funder through his foundation
• Elon Musk b. 1971
  Engineer and entrepreneur whose companies have advanced electric vehicles, reusable rockets, and neural interfaces. donated 5 million dollars in 2021
• Larry Page b. 1973
  Co-founder of Google whose search algorithm became the foundation of the modern internet economy. funded Khan Academy through Google
• Sam Altman b. 1985
  Technology executive and investor whose leadership in generative artificial intelligence has had major but still-unsettled historical consequences. partnered on the Khanmigo AI tutor