Advertisement
Turnover at the top: 17 people have held title of China’s richest person in past 27 years
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming tops rankings this year, but vibrant market makes them much more fluid than in US, Hurun says
2-MIN READ2-MIN
1
Listen
Seventeen Chinese entrepreneurs have held the title of the country’s richest billionaire in the past 27 years, over four times as many as in the United States, which wealth research firm Hurun Group attributed to the “dynamism” of the Chinese market.
China’s richest people – including ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming, Nongfu Spring founder Zhong Shanshan, and Country Garden chairwoman Yang Huiyan – came from sectors including technology, consumption and property, Hurun’s rankings of Chinese billionaires from 1999 to 2026 showed.
In 2001, Liu Yonghao and his brother Liu Yongxing topped the list of the year’s richest 100 people as the owners of New Hope Group, one of the leading feed producers in China, with an estimated net worth of 8.3 billion yuan.
In the US, four billionaires have dominated the rankings for nearly three decades. Bill Gates, founder of global software giant Microsoft, was listed as the country’s richest man roughly 17 times from 1999 to 2017, according to data from Forbes and Hurun, while Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX and Tesla, has led the rankings since 2022.
Select Voice
Select Speed
1x
AI-generated voice