Zhao Jianhui
Source of wealth: Silicon carbide wafers
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Modules
Biography
Zhao jianhui is the chairman of Epiworld International, a maker of silicon carbide (SiC) epitaxial wafers used in power devices for sectors such as EV, renewable energy and AI.
It is the world's largest SiC epitaxial foundry by both revenue and sales volume, accounting for roughly a third of the global market in 2024.
Zhang founded the company in 2011 and took it public on the Hong Kong stock exchange in March 2026.
Zhang has over 35 years of research experience and is the first IEEE Fellow selected based on their contributions to SiC technologies.
He serves as chair professor at Xiamen University in China and worked with Rutgers University in the U.S.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Zhao Jianhui
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 Zhao Jianhui, linked to Manufacturing and 'Silicon carbide wafers', 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.