According to the Hurun Research Institute, based in Shanghai, forty of China’s 73 individuals who feature among the 100 wealthiest on its list derive most of their fortunes from the technology, automotive, or electronics sectors. They account for nearly 55% of China’s top fortunes, or twice what it was ten years ago (26% in 2016).
That figure is more than double what it is in the United States, where tech billionaires make up only 24% of the country’s 100 wealthiest, according to the Bloomberg index.
- Since 2020, the technology sector has been the origin of the wealth of China’s largest fortunes.
- Real estate, the leading sector for China’s major fortunes throughout the 2000s, has faded since the end of the century’s first decade.
- In the 2026 ranking, published on October 27, none of China’s top fortunes derives primarily from real estate1. In 2009, fortunes tied to real estate accounted for nearly 38% of the ranking.
As in the United States, the upper echelons of China’s list are dominated by technology and the electronics sector.
- Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, the parent company of the social network TikTok, has since 2024—intermittently—held the title of China’s richest person. His fortune today stands at nearly $100 billion—almost one-ninth of Elon Musk’s wealth.
- Zeng Yuqun, the chairman and founder of CATL, the world’s leading manufacturer of batteries for electric vehicles, sits in third place, ahead of Ma Huateng, founder of the internet giant Tencent.
- Liang Wenfeng, the founder of the DeepSeek AI lab, has entered at seventh place with a fortune of $41.7 billion, ahead of Chen Tianshi ($30.5 billion), the cofounder of the AI chip designer Cambricon, sometimes nicknamed the “Chinese Nvidia.”
In Europe, only about one in eight fortunes (roughly 13%) originate from tech, electronics, or the automotive sector.
- Among them are notably Andy Bechtolsheim, cofounder of Sun Microsystems and Arista Networks and one of the early investors in Google, the SAP software founders Hasso Plattner and Dietmar Hopp, and the Collison brothers, founders of the online payments company Stripe.
- None of the top ten European fortunes — nor any of the 96 listed by Bloomberg — was built primarily on AI.
- China, by contrast, has two among its top ten — Liang Wenfeng (DeepSeek) and Chen Tianshi (Cambricon) — and the United States one, Jensen Huang (NVIDIA).