Shi Yonghong
Source of wealth: Restaurants
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Modules
Biography
Shi Yonghong cofounded Sichuan hot pot chain Haidilao in 1994 with Zhang Yong, also a billionaire, and two friends who became their wives.
The company, which had about $4.4 billion in sales from almost 1,300 locations in 2020, went public in Hong Kong in September 2018.
Known for offering special services such as free manicures for waiting customers, Haidilao has expanded to the U.S., Japan, South Korea and Singapore.
Shi, who owns his stake in Haidilao with wife Li Haiyan, has a stake in Yihai International, hot pot condiment maker that was spun off from Haidilao.
Shi sits on the board of both companies.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Shi Yonghong
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 Shi Yonghong, linked to Food & Beverage and 'Restaurants', 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 14 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 0.9 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.