Colin Huang isn’t a household name outside China, but he’s one of the world’s richest people.
Huang, aged 44, is China’s richest person. He’s the founder and former CEO of Pinduoduo, a gamified online marketplace connecting buyers and sellers. It’s popular in China and has a market cap of more than $190 billion, giving it a higher valuation than Uber or Sony.
People buy items on Pinduoduo such as iPhones at sale price while playing games, and rope in friends to “group-buy” groceries at huge discounts. Pinduoduo takes a small commission and charges sellers to promote their products on its app, but doesn’t hold any stock.
Huang founded the company in 2015. It’s grown rapidly ever since, and listed in New York in July 2018.
Huang’s fortune exploded after this, with his net worth hitting a high of just over $70 billion in February 2021, per estimates from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, though it’s since dropped. He’s currently worth an estimated $48.6 billion, per Bloomberg, making him China’s richest person and the 25th richest in the world.
In September 2022, Pinduoduo launched its cut-price shopping app Temu in the US. It quickly stormed its way up the download charts.
Here’s how Huang went from a math Olympiad to a Google software engineer to a serial entrepreneur and e-commerce billionaire.