“A couple of guys said, ‘Let’s do a startup in Shanghai,’ ” Zhao says. In 2005, Zhao joined other “sea turtles”-people of Chinese descent educated elsewhere-and moved back to the bustling motherland. As Zhao matured, so did China, which in the years since his family’s departure had welcomed economic reform. Zhao’s trajectory started to crystallize in the early 2000s, after graduation: he interned for a subcontractor of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and developed trading software for Bloomberg Tradebook. Zhao soon enrolled in programming courses in high school and later majored in computer science at McGill University, where his father was once a visiting scholar. The technology, cutting-edge for its time, made an impression on his son. Shengkai, a math whiz and programmer, splurged on a 286 DOS computer priced at $7,000, the equivalent of $14,000 today. During his teen years, the future billionaire took on a variety of part-time jobs-at a Chevron gas station, at McDonald’s and as a referee at volleyball games. Zhao says that it was only after he arrived in Canada, at the age of 12, that he first drank fresh milk, then a rare commodity in China. Shengkai left China to pursue a doctorate at the University of British Columbia in 1984 the rest of the family joined him in Vancouver in 1989, after the protests in Tiananmen Square. Zhao’s university-instructor father, Shengkai, was branded a pro-bourgeois intellectual and exiled to a rural area. Everyday citizens were regularly punished for perceived ideological crimes. The Cultural Revolution ended following the death of Mao Zedong, and the country was mired in poverty and famine. Zhao, bespectacled and slender, was born in 1977 in China’s Jiangsu province, north of Shanghai. The company vehemently insists that it runs a clean shop, but for Binance and Zhao-a man who went from virtual unknown to elusive billionaire in less than a decade-the bigger the success, the bigger the troubles. Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, and has otherwise tangled with authorities across the globe, including in Canada. Binance, along with a slew of American crypto exchanges, is reportedly under investigation by the U.S. And while his company was spared from the layoffs and bankruptcies that swept the landscape, its business practices have attracted scrutiny. Zhao’s net worth had tumbled, too-by a reported US$85 billion. By the time Zhao and I spoke again in July, Bitcoin, a de facto index for the wider industry, had tumbled by almost two-thirds to a low of US$20,000, marking the onset of a so-called crypto winter. In the crypto world, however, fortunes can be fleeting. READ: The Curious Case of Gina Adams: A “Pretendian” investigation He was the wealthiest man few Canadians had ever heard of. Zhao was the richest Canadian: richer than the storied Thomson family, nearly as rich as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and richer than many small countries. A spartan man with few possessions, Zhao has disputed Bloomberg’s calculation, but it’s hard not to marvel at the number. This past January, Bloomberg added Zhao to its Billionaires Index in a blazing debut, with an estimated net worth of US$96 billion. That approach has proved profitable: last year, the exchange had 80 million users and processed nearly US$34.2 trillion in trades. Zhao has developed an opposing tack to those newbie kung fu students, a decide-and-execute strategy that’s been an integral part of Binance’s operating model from its startup days in 2017 to now. Rich, successful men tend to see everything as an analogy for business. “If the opponent is dynamic,” he said, “a preset of moves does not work very well.” For Zhao, that kind of thinking is entirely too rigid. “A junior kung fu student will have a plan,” said Zhao, who is a fan of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. It was March of 2021, and I had joined the Vancouver billionaire and CEO of Binance-the world’s largest platform for buying and selling cryptocurrency-on a group audio call on Clubhouse, then an exclusive chat app. The first time I spoke with Changpeng Zhao, he was explaining the intricacies of Chinese martial arts.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |