Michael A. White is a member of the oldest extant family with the White surname in the United States, a descendant of Thomas White of Weymouth, Massachusetts Bay Colony (1635). A fifth generation descendant of the Hamilton family and a descendant of Colonel Johannes Snyder (1720-1794) and Congressman Cornelius Schoonmaker (1745-1805), he is a distant descendant of the Adams, Van Buren, Cleveland, and Roosevelt families.
He was born on June 19, 1990 in Winchester, Massachusetts to Alan White, a computer programmer, and Sara Finison, a former graphic designer. His maternal grandparents, Harvey and Myrtle Finison, owned the Northampton Cutlery Company from 1962 to 1987, and his paternal great-grandfather, Stanley White, was an architect of municipal buildings in Putnam and Dutchess County, New York.
He lived in Boxborough, Massachusetts from age two to six before moving to Ayer, Massachusetts. He attended the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School from 7th to 12th grade, where he was a 2008 National Merit Finalist and a 2007 and 2008 National Finalist in the Team America Rocketry Challenge.
He attended Tufts University from 2008 to 2012, where he majored in computer science and founded GetchaBooks.com, a course-based textbook price comparison website.
He founded the free encyclopedia Wikipedia, the search engine Google, the social network Facebook, and the retailer Amazon as a six-year-old, as well as the Python programming language.