From a man with a van in China who is now the country’s third-richest with his company SF Express, to Uber’s chief executive who got in an unfortunate tangle with a driver, to the founder Amazon founder’s high-flying ambitions in the rocket industry, today’s tycoons are getting things on the move. Our bi-weekly look at the world of billionaires:
Wang Wei
Shuttling parcels around for Alibaba and other retailers is creating China’s latest wealth explosion, with a surge in shares of SF Express, making Wang Wei the country’s third-richest man.
The official launch of SF Express’s listing on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, pushed through rapidly with government support, helped to produce a 59 per cent surge in shares of parent SF Holding, giving Mr Wang a net worth of US$27.6 billion.
The son of a Russian interpreter for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, Mr Wang saw opportunity early in the trade across China’s border with Hong Kong. While his family immigrated to Hong Kong when he was a child, he later returned to mainland China to establish the business, financed by a loan of $13,000 from his father. He began with six delivery men (of which he was one) and a van.
“When SF started delivering packages in the 1990s, it was still an illegal business called ‘black delivery’,” Mr Wang in 2011 told the official People’s Daily, the only interview he is known to have granted. “According to the regulations then, we would be fined if our operations were caught by postal officers, so we had to handle packages sneakily.”
Now the courier operates 36 cargo aircraft and about 15,000 vehicles.
“I know the taste of being poor, of being discriminated against by people for being poor,” Mr Wang has said. “My parents were university professors in the mainland, but their academic records were not recognised when we moved to Hong Kong when I was little. So we started from scratch.”
The South China Morning Post said Mr Wang is known for being demanding, but also stands up for his people. During the IPO's bell-ringing ceremony he called on his employees to "do more and talk less". Also invited to ring the bell was one of his employees who had been slapped in the face by the driver of a luxury car last year.
Travis Kalanick
Speaking of arguments with drivers, Uber Technologies is seeking a chief operating officer, making good on a pledge by Travis Kalanick to seek “leadership help” after his verbal altercation with a driver was caught on video.
Bloomberg estimates his net worth at $6.7bn.
The new hire will be, “a peer who can partner with me to write the next chapter in our journey,” Mr Kalanick, the chief executive, said in a posting on the company’s website on Tuesday.
Uber has been in the limelight for all the wrong reasons this year. The ride-hailing app was criticised for undermining a taxi strike against Mr Trump’s immigration ban in January. In February, a former employee wrote a blog post about her experiences of sexual harassment while working for the company and Uber is also facing a lawsuit from Alphabet’s autonomous car company Waymo for allegedly stealing trade secrets.
The argument with the driver, made public late last month, was the last straw. A day after the video was released, Mr Kalanick wrote an email to his employees saying, “I need leadership help, and I intend to get it.”
Jeff Bezos
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has a rocket company with the motto “gradatim ferociter,” Latin for “step by step, ferociously.”
Now Mr Bezos is applying that intensity toward making space travel more like hopping on an airplane.
A week after his rocket rival Elon Musk revealed plans to send two people on a trip around the moon late next year, Mr Bezos said on Tuesday that his Blue Origin has flown its New Shepard capsule and booster more than 100 kilometres into the air five times. He foresees flying thrill-seeking tourists on such missions – to the edge of space and back – bringing down costs much in the way modern-day trips on planes were made possible by stunt pilots who took trips with people in the 1920s.
“They would go around and land in farmers’ fields and sell tickets,” Mr Bezos told the crowd at Satellite 2017, a conference held in Washington. “The entertainment industry can often be a driver of technology that then gets repurposed. That tourism mission, because we can fly it so frequently, is going to be a real driver of our technology.”
The expansion ahead for Blue Origin involves inking a deal with the French satellite operator Eutelsat Communications, which has signed on as the first client of Mr Bezos’s New Glenn orbital rocket. The deal marks an entry into the commercial satellite market for a company that has relied on its billionaire founder’s deep pockets for more than 15 years.
The New Glenn rocket – named after John Glenn, who was the first American to orbit Earth – is to launch with a Eutelsat satellite on board in 2021.
Mr Musk’s SpaceX, which has contracts with Nasa and commercial satellite companies, last week said two private citizens paid a “significant deposit” to go on the week-long flight around the moon. A rocket company led by a third billionaire, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, also envisions hundreds of thousands of people having the chance to become astronauts by the end of the century.
Mr Bezos, 53, said he has been entranced with space since he was a five-year-old and watched the Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.
Kieu Hoang
A California billionaire who was born in Vietnam has donated $5 million for flood relief efforts in the city of San Jose.
After heavy rains sent flood waters rushing through several of the city’s neighbourhoods, about four-fifths of the 400 displaced families were Vietnamese.
But on March 1, Kieu Hoang stepped forward with a $5m cheque to city officials for a relief fund operated by several charities.
Before Mr Hoang wrote his cheque, the relief effort had raised nearly $1m.
Mr Hoang was a refugee from Vietnam himself who once went on to build a fortune in medical products.
“This is the time you need to pay back,” the 70-year-old said of his desire to help the flood victims. “These are the old, the sick, the disabled.”
At a news conference, residents clapped at the donation news and snapped selfies with the businessman.
According to Forbes, Mr Hoang’s first job when he arrived in the US after the Vietnam War paid him $1.25 an hour at Abbott Laboratories. He secured it through an Abbott employee whom he met at the church in suburban Los Angeles that had sponsored his immigration. In his job interview he confessed that he lacked the right skills for the job but said: “With my intelligence I will be able to learn.”
After rising through the ranks at Abbott, he started his own companies, Rare Antibody Antigen Supply in 1980 and Shanghai Raas Blood Products in 1992. The latter is listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and is a supplier of products derived from blood such as albumin and immunoglobin.
Today Mr Hoang’s holdings include a ranch near Los Angeles that he has been planning to make into a wellness centre for cancer patients. Forbes says his net worth is $2.7bn.
Gina Rinehart
Speaking of ranches, the Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart has bought a cattle station in Australia’s Northern Territory, expanding her footprint in the agricultural sector.
The Aroona cattle ranch covers 147,510 hectares and holds about 15,000 cattle. The price was not disclosed.
The purchase comes three months after Ms Rinehart was cleared by the Australian government to buy the cattle company S Kidman & Co. The government had blocked the sale of the 118-year-old company in 2015 to China’s Shanghai Pengxin Group on national security grounds.
The Aroona property will “help to provide better market timing options for some of Hancock Beef’s Kimberley cattle stations,” Ms Rinehart said in a statement. “It will well complement our existing investments in the north.”
She is the richest woman in the Asia-Pacific region and has a net worth of $12.8bn, according to Bloomberg.
Dmitry Rybolovlev
The Russian fertilizer kingpin Dmitry Rybolovlev paid €54 million (Dh209.2m) for a landscape by Paul Gauguin in a private transaction in June 2008. Last week he took a 74 per cent loss on the investment.
Gauguin’s 1892 landscape Te Fare (La Maison) fetched £20.3 million (Dh90.6m), including commission, at a sale of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s in London. Mr Rybolovlev will net about $22m based on the hammer price. The auction house had estimated the value at $15m to $22.4m. The buyer was a client of Rebecca Wei, president of Christie’s Asia.
Mr Rybolovlev, with a fortune of about $9.8bn, invested about $2bn in 38 works of art, from Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso. They were procured privately by the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier, known for creating a network of tax-free art storage warehouses in Singapore and Luxembourg.
Two years ago, Mr Rybolovlev sued Bouvier, alleging he was overcharged by as much as $1bn. Since then Mr Rybolovlev has been unloading artworks. He has already sold three for a loss totaling an estimated $100m.
The art industry is closely watching the London auctions, which are to end today, as the year’s first test of the global market following a significant contraction in 2016.
Philip Green
Britain’s pensions regulator last week agreed a cash settlement worth up to £363m with the unpopular billionaire Philip Green, former owner of the now-collapsed department store chain BHS.
The regulator, which formally launched legal action against Mr Green to plug a hole in two BHS pension funds in November, said the deal had the support of the trustees of the schemes which have 19,000 members.
“I hope that this solution puts their minds at rest and closes this sorry chapter for them,” Mr Green said in a statement.
He owned BHS for 15 years before he sold the loss-making 180-store chain to Dominic Chappell, a serial bankrupt with no retail experience, for £1 in 2015. BHS went into administration in April 2016 and the last of its stores closed in August. Some 11,000 jobs were lost.
A high-profile parliamentary inquiry followed the collapse, and the tycoon’s reputation took a battering. MPs from across the political spectrum labelled Mr Green – who is worth a reported £4.8bn, according to Forbes – an “aset stripper” and a “billionaire spiv” (flashy charlatan).
They also voted to strip him of the knighthood he received for services to the retail sector in a largely symbolic move.
“Once again I would like to apologise to the BHS pensioners for this last year of uncertainty, which was clearly never the intention when the business was sold,” Mr Green said.
* Agencies and The National
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