Cai Haoyu
Source of wealth: Mobile games
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Modules
Biography
Cai Haoyu is a cofounder of Shanghai-based online games developer miHoYo, which he established in 2012 with college friends, Liu Wei and Luo Yuhao.
He stepped down as miHoYo chairman in 2023 for unexplained reasons and handed the reins over to Liu, but continued to retain a large stake.
Games from the company often feature anime-style characters and rich storylines.
By 2024, players worldwide have spent more than $5 billion on its blockbuster game Genshin Impact, four years after its release, according to research firm Sensor Tower.
Liu and Luo are both billionaires.
Financial Assets
Financial assets information not available.
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Cai Haoyu
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Cai Haoyu, linked to Technology and 'Mobile games', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 43 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 2.7 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.