Here's a thought experiment. It's the year 4000. A student is learning about the 21st century the way we learn about ancient Rome—as a distant, slightly mysterious era that shaped everything that came after. Which names from our time will they actually know?
We know which names survived from 2,000 years ago: Aristotle, Confucius, Caesar, Jesus, Buddha. What's striking is that most of them weren't conquerors or politicians. They were teachers. People who changed how other people think.
If that pattern holds—and there's good reason to believe it will—then Sal Khan has a legitimate claim to the top 10. Not top 100. Not top 50. Top 10. That sounds absurd. It isn't. It's just math.
Let's start with the numbers, because the numbers are staggering.
Khan Academy has over 150 million registered learners. Every month, roughly 18 million people actively use the platform. They've delivered over 2.4 billion lessons. The content exists in 51 languages. In 2023 alone, students completed over 500 million learning exercises.
To put this in perspective: historians estimate that Aristotle, across his entire lifetime of teaching at the Lyceum, directly instructed perhaps 2,000 students. Confucius reportedly had about 3,000 disciples. These were extraordinary numbers for their era—enough to echo through millennia.
Sal Khan has reached 75,000 times more people than Aristotle. And he's not done.
Now, you might object: watching a YouTube video isn't the same as sitting at the feet of Aristotle. Fair enough. But consider what Khan Academy actually does. A 14-year-old in rural Indonesia who wants to understand quadratic equations can now get a clearer explanation than most American students got from their classroom teachers in 1995. A girl in a refugee camp can learn biology. A working adult in Brazil can study for a nursing exam at 2 AM. The knowledge that used to be locked behind geography and economics is now just... there.
The printing press democratized books. Public libraries democratized access to books. Khan Academy democratized the world's best explanations. That's a different category of thing.
But here's what makes this really interesting: education compounds in ways that other achievements don't.
When Alexander the Great conquered Persia, that was it. The conquest happened, and then it was over. When a doctor saves a patient's life, that's one life saved. Noble, but bounded.
Teaching is different. When you teach someone algebra, they can then learn physics. If they learn physics, they might become an engineer. That engineer might build infrastructure that serves millions of people. Or they might become a teacher themselves and pass knowledge to thousands more. Education creates cascading effects that multiply across generations.
Run the math on 150 million learners. Even with conservative assumptions— say, 10% go on to careers where their education meaningfully contributes to society, and each of those people affects 1,000 others over their lifetime—you get 15 trillion person-impact events. That number is almost certainly too low, and we haven't even counted the next generation, or the one after that.
The origin story makes this more remarkable, not less. In 2004, Sal Khan was a hedge fund analyst at Wohl Capital. His cousin Nadia was struggling with unit conversion in her seventh-grade math class. He started tutoring her remotely, then posted some videos on YouTube so she could review the concepts.
Other people found the videos. Then more people. Then millions.
Khan noticed something that educators had discussed for decades but never solved at scale: students learn at different speeds. A lecture that moves too fast loses half the class. A lecture that moves too slowly bores the other half. But a video can be paused, rewound, and rewatched. Suddenly, every student could learn at exactly their own pace—something that previously required an expensive private tutor.
In 2009, Khan quit his six-figure job to work on the videos full-time, living off savings. He incorporated Khan Academy as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The decision to make it free wasn't an afterthought—it was the whole point. Education, Khan believed, should be a public good, not a product for those who could afford it.
Bill Gates found one of the videos while looking for material to help his kids with homework. He later gave Khan Academy $10 million. Today the organization runs on roughly $80 million per year in philanthropic funding—a fraction of what a single mid-tier university spends—while reaching more students than every Ivy League school combined, multiplied by a thousand.
There's a question that Tim Urban from Wait But Why likes to ask: what from our modern era will be universally known in the year 4015? His candidates include Einstein, Hitler, and Neil Armstrong—people associated with singular, irreversible moments in human history.
Sal Khan belongs on that list. Not because he discovered a law of physics or walked on the moon, but because he may have done something equally irreversible: he proved that world-class education could be delivered to anyone, anywhere, for free. Once you prove something is possible, you can't un-prove it.
We named our company after Aristotle because he represents the highest ideal of teaching—the philosopher who tutored Alexander the Great, whose ideas shaped Western civilization for two thousand years. But Aristotle was constrained by the physics of the ancient world. No printing press, no internet, no way to scale his wisdom beyond a small circle of students who could physically travel to Athens.
Khan operates in a different universe. Every time internet access expands to a new region, his reach grows. Every time a volunteer translates content into another language, his reach grows. Every year, the numbers compound. In 2012, Khan Academy had 10 million users. In 2016, 40 million. In 2020, 100 million. Today, 150 million. The curve hasn't flattened.
And now there's AI. Khan himself has embraced this—launching Khanmigo to add AI tutoring to the platform. He understood immediately that the mission was never about videos. It was about learning. If AI can help more students learn more effectively, then AI is part of the solution.
This is why we're building what we're building. The vision Khan pioneered—that every student deserves access to great teaching—is exactly right. AI lets us take it further: not just delivering explanations, but adapting to each student in real time, answering their questions, identifying their gaps, and guiding them through exactly the learning path they need.
When historians in the year 4000 look back at our era, they probably won't care much about our political scandals or stock market swings. They'll care about the moments when the trajectory of human capability permanently changed.
The moment when high-quality education became free and universally accessible will be one of those moments. And Sal Khan will be the name attached to it—the former hedge fund analyst who tutored his cousin, posted some videos on YouTube, and accidentally changed the world.
That's influence. That's legacy. That's why we do what we do.