Binance founder explains what it feels like to accumulate as much wealth as Zuckerberg overnight

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao is one of the richest people in the world. In fact, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index places him fifteenth on the list, having amassed the same net worth as Meta creator Mark Zuckerbergfour times faster.

However, Zhao explains that this wealth is “fictional”, and that most of it only exists on paper. Nevertheless, this “fiction” accumulates a value of about 74,000 million dollarsraised in just five years, more than Dell founder Michael Dell or each of Sam Walton’s three sons, the heirs to the Walmart fortune.

The heritage of this entrepreneur is due to his company, the largest cryptocurrency trading platform, whose main competitor, Coinbase, has a market capitalization six times lower.

On the contrary, the other side of the coin shows that not everything is light behind the hill. Changpeng Zhao’s childhood and adolescence were far from the life he can lead today.

In his youth he had to suffer food rationing

The one who today has become one of the richest people in the world grew up in a rural village in Jiangsu, China. In this small town, Zhao was forced into food rationing, queuing for a passbook to buy meat. “We weren’t starving”bill.

On the other hand, the youth of this entrepreneur happened in this village because his father was expelled from a larger city for his “bourgeois leanings”as explained to Fortune.

Years later, the student uprising in Tiananmen Square and the consequent repression by the Chinese government changed the perspective of that 12-year-old boy, who saw how his family took him out of his country of origin to establish his life in Canada.

In the North American country, Zhao began to earn his first income cooking hamburgers at a McDonald’s and refereeing volleyball matches.

However, years later, he decided to study software development and spent years working in Tokyo and New Yorkwhich helped him to acquire enough knowledge to start the journey towards the creation of the largest cryptocurrency platform in the world.

Since then, it took only five years for Zhao to rise to 15th place in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. “I went from being a businessman to someone telling me I have tens of billions”he points out.

Despite this, this entrepreneur is known, like many other tech moguls, for his simplicity when it comes to dressing, characterized by a screen-printed shirt with the brand ‘Binance’ and a hoodie.