From technology to fundamental science and outer space, Tencent’s Pony Ma always has his sights set on new frontiers
When Ma Huateng was young, he was obsessed with space and its celestial phenomena and wanted to be an astronomer. It was, however, much later in life that Ma would return to this early interest. First, he would make his name in technology.
Ma, who has become known as Pony Ma—an appellation purportedly derived from the English translation of the Chinese character ma, which means horse—was born in 1971 in Shantou, Guangdong. Relatively little is known about his early years, save that in 1989 he enrolled to study computer science at Shenzhen University.
From there, his star has been on the rise. He’s now CEO and chairman of Chinese internet behemoth Tencent Holdings, the parent company of the WeChat messaging and online payment app, and this year, just 25 years after his graduation, Forbes declared Ma the richest man in China with an estimated net worth of around US$45 billion.
How to become the richest man in China
It all began with the backing of one horse—Tencent. In 1998, several years after leaving university, Ma founded Tencent, whose name plays on the Chinese characters teng and xun, which together can mean “galloping message.” It referenced the company’s first product, an instant messaging service widely seen as a replica of the Israeli-created ICQ.
Despite being labelled a copycat, the product Ma had tweaked to suit the Chinese market, which he named QQ, was met with instant success. In 2004, Tencent went public on the Hong Kong stock exchange. However, it was not until 2011, when Weixin was born, that people really started to take notice.
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QQ became a phenomenon. In one year it had reached 100 million users and was rebranded WeChat. Originally used simply for texting, it was given new features rapidly, first voice messages, then video calling, until it became an amalgamation of the functions of some of the world’s most-used technology apps, including WhatsApp, Facebook, Uber, Deliveroo, Apple Pay and Spotify, with the addition of gaming and reading online.
By 2018, the super app had hit more than one billion users and the digital wallet function, WeChat Pay, is now considered one of the only payment means with the potential to rival Visa, Mastercard and American Express.