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Eva Xiao · · 5 min readMeet Pony Ma, the media-shy billionaire behind Tencent
Despite Tencent’s heft and valuation – about US$500 billion at the time of writing – relatively little is known about Pony Ma, the media-shy CEO of Asia’s most valuable company. Unlike Jack Ma, his gregarious counterpart at Alibaba (the two men are unrelated), Pony Ma tends to avoid the spotlight.
As a young boy, the Tencent boss dreamed of being an astronomer, not an entrepreneur. But his fateful decision to study computer science at Shenzhen University turned his path towards China’s internet industry, which took off around the same time.
Today, Ma’s net worth is around US$47 billion – about twice that of Tesla founder-CEO Elon Musk. He also oversees one of the most influential tech giants in China. Tencent operates WeChat – China’s most popular social app – and has a sprawling gaming empire that includes League of Legends, Clash of Clans, and CrossFire.
“The internet is very much like an indeterminate galaxy in the middle of exploding, isn’t it?” said Ma in The Tencent Biography (Editor’s note: English translation ours).
Here are some of the key milestones from Pony Ma’s life and how he grew Tencent.
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He dreamed of being a scientist, not an entrepreneur. Here’s how Pony Ma built one of the world’s biggest tech empires.
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