Bobby Yip/Reuters; Ruben Sprich/Reuters
A composite image of Tencent founder and CEO Pony Ma and Alibaba founder Jack Ma.
- Alibaba founder Jack Ma has been competing with one man to be the richest person in China for at least two years now.
- That man is Pony Ma, who is the founder and CEO of the tech conglomerate Tencent.
- Tencent operates the popular messaging app WeChat, which has more than 1 billion active users and whose vision Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to follow.
- Learn more about Pony Ma in the slides below.
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Alibaba founder Jack Ma is arguably the most well-known tech billionaire in China, having grabbed headlines with his eccentric dance performances and presided over bizarre mass weddings for employees.
But there's another face in Chinese tech that we should be looking out for: Ma Huateng, also known by his nickname Pony, who has for years been jostling with Jack to become the richest man in China.
Pony Ma and Jack Ma have constantly overtaken each other as the richest person in China on Forbes's static rich list. (The two men are not related; Ma is a common Chinese surname.)
Pony Ma is the founder and CEO of internet company Tencent, which own the super-popular WeChat app. As of July 2019, Pony Ma has a net worth of $32.8 billion, compared to Jack Ma's $34.6 billion.
Scroll down to learn more about Pony Ma and his company, which went from being a startup notorious for selling knockoffs to the owner of the most popular app in China.
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