Ma Huateng, also known as Pony Ma, is a Chinese billionaire entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Tencent Holdings, a Chinese technology conglomerate and holding company that is best known for its instant messaging app WeChat and also for mobile gaming.
As of January 2021, Ma is worth $46.8 billion which places him at the thirty-first spot on the Forbes Real Times Billionaires List. According to Bloomberg, most of Ma's wealth comes from a 7.4% stake in Tencent—one of the most valuable companies in Asia with a market value of over $561 billion.
Ma Huateng's life
Ma partly grew up in Shenzhen, a global centre in technology and research and dubbed as “China’s Silicon Valley” by many. He graduated from Shenzhen University in 1993 with a degree in computer science. His first job was writing code for pagers at a telecommunications firm in Shenzhen where he used to earn $176 a month. Ma co-founded Tencent in November 1998 together with college classmate Zhang Zhidong. The firm’s first product was instant messaging software similar to AOL's ICQ. Initially, the product was named OICQ but was later changed to QQ. Interestingly, Ma first met his wife Wang Danting on QQ.
By 2004, Tencent controlled more than two-thirds of the Chinese instant messaging market prompting Ma to take the company public. The company raised $200 million in an IPO and was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange quickly making Ma one of the richest people in China’s telecom industry.
In 2010, Ma set up two competing teams of engineers asking them to create a new product. One team presented an app for text messaging and group chat—WeChat—which launched the following year. As of 2022, the app has over 1.2 billion monthly active users. The application has evolved into a so-called “super-app” because of its wide-ranging services that also include payments, video conferencing and video games.
Tencent also has minority stakes in Tesla, music streaming service Spotify, and social media platform Snapchat's parent company.
Ma uses the nickname Pony, which is derived from the English translation of his family name Ma, which is the Chinese word for "horse". Ma keeps a low profile in contrast to his former business rival at Alibaba, Jack Ma.
