Ye Guofu
Source of wealth: Retail
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Modules
Biography
Ye Guofu is the founder and CEO of budget retail chain Miniso, known for its value-for-money goods such as $1.5 mascara and $6 headphones.
The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in October 2020.
Once branded as Japan-inspired, Miniso apologized in 2022 for its marketing strategy amid consumer backlash at home. It has has since removed Japanese elements from its store and logo designs.
Banking on a franchise-heavy model for expansion, the company now has over 5,000 Miniso shops, including more than 2,000 overseas.
Ye holds a degree from Zhongnan University of Economics and Law.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Ye Guofu
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 Ye Guofu, linked to Fashion & Retail and 'Retail', 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 11 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 0.7 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.