Zhang Yong
Source of wealth: Restaurants
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Modules
Biography
Restaurateur Zhang Yong is chairman and CEO of Sichuan hotpot chain Haidilao International Holding, which went public in 2018.
Haidilao has nearly 1,400 restaurants in Greater China. It is renowned for its spicy dishes and attentive customer service, including free manicures for waiting customers.
It spun off its overseas business Super Hi, which went public in Hong Kong in 2022 and had a dual listing on Nasdaq in 2024. Super Hi has over 100 restaurants in international markets.
Having never finished high school, the entrepreneur says he didn't even know how to prepare the typical Sichuan hotpot when he started.
Three friends, including Shu Ping who became his wife, helped with seed money, but he ran the place. He stepped down as CEO in 2022 to focus on long-term strategies, but returned to the post in 2026 to address a slump in the company's business performance.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Zhang Yong
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 Zhang Yong, 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 35 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 2.2 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.