At the age of 41, Forrest Li is now a billionaire.
The founding father of Singapore tech unicorn Sea has entered the world’s billionaire list with a 13.8% stake price about $1 billion (S$1.3 billion). Bloomberg announced on Friday (March 1).
Bloomberg says the corporate owns gaming site Garena and e-commerce site Shopee. Both firms are expected to see sharp earnings growth in the approaching yr. It also counts the Chinese giant Tencent amongst its shareholders.
Bloomberg Li’s latest wealth is especially resulting from the success of Garena’s game “Free Fire,” which Bloomberg called “Singapore’s Fortnite.”
Over 40 million players and over 350 million registered users from Brazil to Indonesia log in to Free Fire daily. In 2018, it was the fourth most downloaded game on the earth on the Apple and Google app stores.
Born and raised within the port city of Tianjin by lifelong employees of state-owned firms, Li attended Shanghai University as a young person.
He spent most nights playing games at the web cafe until dawn.
In a school English class, he adopted the name Forrest when an American instructor asked each student to provide you with a Western name. Li adopted his English name after identifying with Tom Hank’s Oscar-winning portrayal of the fictional character Forrest Gump. Li’s Chinese name is Xiaodong.
Li met his wife at Stanford and attended her graduation ceremony in 2005 – the identical one to which Apple founder Steve Jobs was invited, in accordance with Bloomberg.
Jobs’ speech, which included the now famous mantra “stay hungry, stay silly,” inspired Li, who replayed the speech on YouTube daily “for months” to collect the courage to start out Garena.
Since then, he has lived by Jobs’ mantra.
According to Forbes‘ List Singapore’s 50 richest peopleLi entered Singapore’s richest list after Sea’s listing on the New York Stock Exchange in October 2017.
