Cheah Cheng Hye
Source of wealth: Investments
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Modules
Biography
Cheah Cheng Hye is honorary chairman of Hong Kong-listed asset management firm Value Partners Group, which he cofounded in 1993 and took public in 2007.
He stepped down as cochairman in January 2025.
Born in Malaysia, he worked as a reporter, subeditor and writer at the Star newspaper in the country after leaving Penang Free School with a high school diploma.
In 1974, he traveled to Hong Kong, where he had stints in journalism at the Standard, HK-TVB News, the Asian Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review.
He worked at Morgan Grenfell Group in Hong Kong before starting Value Partners.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Cheah Cheng Hye
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 Cheah Cheng Hye, linked to Finance & Investments and 'Investments', 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 9 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 0.6 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.