Ma Huateng

In 1999 Tencent's founders set a minimum price and went looking for a buyer: the messaging service had one million users, no revenue, and was burning roughly 400,000 yuan a month. The best offer was 86,327 dollars, and Ma declined it.¹ Known in the West by the nickname Pony, he is the chairman and chief executive officer of Tencent Holdings, the Chinese internet and technology conglomerate that grew out of that service, listed in Hong Kong. Tencent owns WeChat, a messaging application that combines chat, payments, and small in-app programs into a single service used by more than a billion people each month, along with QQ, the world's largest video-game publishing business by revenue, the WeChat Pay mobile-payments network, and one of technology's most active portfolios of minority investments. Ma has run the company since he co-founded it in 1998 and is among the wealthiest people in China.

Background

Ma was born on October 29, 1971, in the Chaoyang district of Shantou, in Guangdong Province. His father, Ma Chenshu, worked as a port administrator and his mother was an accountant. The family moved to the young city of Shenzhen in 1984 when his father took a port-management job there. As a child Ma was drawn to astronomy and built a telescope at age eight. At fourteen he wanted a professional telescope to view Halley's Comet, an instrument that cost roughly four months of his father's salary; his father at first refused, and Ma wrote in his diary that the refusal had killed his ambition of becoming a great scientist. His mother read the entry and the family relented. Ma has said, "I like astronomy. It makes me feel very small," and has described this sense of smallness as a way of staying calm through difficulty.¹

Ma attended Shenzhen Middle School, where all five of Tencent's eventual co-founders were classmates. He scored well enough on the national college examination to qualify for Tsinghua University but chose Shenzhen University instead because Tsinghua had no astronomy department, and studied computer science and applied engineering, earning a bachelor's degree in 1993. In university he wrote programs to reserve lab computers for himself and sold his first commercial software, a stock-analysis tool, at twenty-two for 50,000 yuan.¹

Getting started

Ma's early jobs were in communications software. He developed pager software at China Motion Telecom Development for about 176 dollars a month and later worked on internet-calling services at Shenzhen Runxun Communications. In 1995 he ran a Shenzhen bulletin-board system called PonySoft whose early users reportedly included Lei Jun, later the founder of Xiaomi, and Ding Lei, later the founder of NetEase.¹

Ma pitched Runxun's management on an instant-messaging product modeled on the chat service ICQ, and was asked whether it would charge users money. On November 11, 1998, he registered Tencent with four classmates, taking a 47.5 percent stake, with Zhang Zhidong holding 20 percent and the remainder split among Zeng Liqing, Chen Yidan, and Xu Chenye. In February 1999 the company launched OICQ, a Chinese version of ICQ, which reached 100,000 users in its first month and one million by year's end while burning roughly 400,000 yuan a month with no revenue. The founders set a minimum price to sell the company; the best offer they received was 86,327 dollars, and Ma declined it.¹ A trademark dispute later forced a rename from OICQ to QQ.

What he built

In 1999, IDG Capital and PCCW invested 2.2 million dollars for 40 percent of Tencent, just before the dot-com crash. In 2001 the South African group Naspers, through its MIH unit, invested 32 million dollars for 46.5 percent; the decision was reportedly prompted by an executive who counted QQ icons on screens in Chinese internet cafes and concluded the user base was enormous.¹ That stake became one of the most valuable media investments on record. Tencent went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2004, raising about 200 million dollars, with QQ controlling roughly three-quarters of the Chinese instant-messaging market.

In January 2011 Tencent launched WeChat, which had emerged from an internal contest among competing teams, and it grew into the world's largest messaging platform and a model for the "super-app" that folds payments, commerce, mini-programs, and government services into one interface. By the early 2020s Tencent reported revenue on the order of 86 billion dollars and employed roughly 110,000 people.² In 2016 Ma transferred about 2.3 billion dollars of his personal shares to the Ma Huateng Global Foundation, focused on health and education, and in 2018 he published a book, China on Fingertips, about the country's mobile-internet transformation.²

How he operates

Ma keeps a low public profile compared with other Chinese technology founders and rarely engages Western media. Inside Tencent he has favored running competing internal teams on the same problem rather than a single top-down roadmap, the process that produced WeChat. He has publicly defended fast-following as a strategy, with the phrase "to copy is not evil," entering markets with a clone to learn user behavior before out-executing rivals; he has described WeChat as Tencent's first fully original flagship product.¹ Much of Tencent's reach has come through an unusually broad portfolio of minority stakes in companies such as Meituan, JD.com, Pinduoduo, Sea Limited, Snap, Tesla, and Spotify, minority positions built across an ecosystem rather than control bought outright.

Where things stand

As of mid-2026, Forbes estimated Ma's net worth at about 48.7 billion dollars, ranking him around 36th in the world.² He remains chairman and chief executive of Tencent, lives in Shenzhen, and is married. His wealth has been volatile since 2021, when Chinese regulators tightened rules on gaming and internet platforms, cutting Tencent's valuation. The company remains the dominant Chinese messaging, payments, and gaming conglomerate and one of the largest global generators of gaming revenue, while operating under continued regulatory scrutiny at home.

Key facts

• Nearly sold Tencent for 86,327 dollars in 1999, when it had one million users and no revenue, and declined the offer.
• All five of Tencent's co-founders had been classmates at the same Shenzhen middle school.
• Chose Shenzhen University over Tsinghua, despite qualifying, because Tsinghua had no astronomy department.
• Naspers invested 32 million dollars for 46.5 percent of Tencent in 2001 after an executive counted QQ icons in internet cafes.
• Publicly defended cloning with the line "to copy is not evil"; WeChat, launched in 2011, was Tencent's first fully original flagship product.
• Donated about 2.3 billion dollars of personal shares to his own foundation in 2016.