What Is Richard Liu's Net Worth?
Richard Liu is a Chinese businessman and entrepreneur who has a net worth of $8 billion. Richard Liu's company, JD.com, is one of the largest retailers in China, inspiring comparisons to Amazon.
Early Life
Richard Liu was born Liu Qiangdong on March 10, 1973, in Suqian, Jiangsu, China. His parents were in the business of shipping coal from north China to the south. Richard attended primary school in the Jiangsu province and enrolled in the Department of Sociology at the Renmin University of China in 1992. However, because he feared his degree would not result in good job opportunities, he spent his free time learning computer programming. Liu graduated with a Bachelor of Laws in sociology in 1996 and later received an executive master of business administration from China Europe International Business School, Shanghai.
Career
After graduating, Liu got a job with Japan Life, a Japanese health product enterprise. While there, he served as the director for computers, the director for business, and the logistics supervisor. In June 1998, he started his own business called Jingdong in an industrial park in Beijing. The company distributed magneto-optical products. After the SARS outbreak in 2003, Liu was forced to rethink his business model, as people were forced to stay at home and his brick-and-mortar stores were suffering. He decided to divert to an e-commerce model. In 2004, he launched his first retail website and then founded JD.com later that year. Richard closed all of his physical stores in 2005 and fully transitioned to the e-commerce model.
By 2005, Liu had already received an offer to sell JD.com for 18 million yuan. He rejected the offer, confident he would be able to oversee the growth of the company over the coming years. In 2007, he employed a full-category strategy for the company, changing the company's business model from selling consumer electronics to a much larger variety of goods. It quickly became one of the leading e-commerce businesses in China, drawing comparisons to Amazon given its similar business model. Liu himself also has been compared to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as a self-made individual.
Over the next years, JD.com continued to grow. The company applied to go public in the United States in January 2014. A few months later, on May 22nd, the date of JD.com's IPO, the stock price of the company rose about 15%. The company remains the second largest internet-company in the world and the largest e-commerce company in China. In April 2022, JD.com announced that Liu would be stepping down as CEO to be replaced by Lei Xu, the company's then-president.
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Personal Life
Liu dated Gong Xiaojing while attending the Renmin University of China. They broke up in 2003. In 2006, Richard had a son. The name of the mother is not publicly known, though some believe that Liu may have privately been married to her. In August 2015, Richard married Zhang Zetian, an internet celebrity. At the time, Liu was 41, while Zetian was 22. Their relationship started when Liu studied at Columbia University, and Zhang was an exchange student at Barnard College, which was affiliated with Columbia. Richard confirmed their relationship to the public through his social media platform. Their marriage was registered in August, and they held a wedding ceremony on October 1, 2015, in Sydney, Australia. They welcomed a daughter in March 2016.
Liu has been at the center of a number of scandals and controversies. On July 23, 2018, he was named to be the host of a party in Sydney that had happened three years before in 2015 at which a woman was raped. A guest of the party, Xu Longwei, was found guilty of seven charges, including having non-consensual sex with a woman he had met at Liu's apartment. Richard himself was not charged with a crime or accused of any wrongdoing so he asked for his name to be suppressed, though the Australian court denied this request.
In August 2018, Richard Liu was arrested in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on the charge of rape. The complainant was a 21-year-old Chinese student who attended a dinner party with Liu. She alleged that after the party ended, Liu returned with her to her apartment and raped her. Richard was released pending further investigation and returned to Beijing. A few days later, JD.com released a statement that said the company would be taking legal action against any false reporting or rumors about the charge as the local police had reportedly found no substance to the claim against Liu, though the police had not yet issued such a statement. The topic was debated heavily on social media in China, where it is much more challenging for women to bring claims of sexual misconduct. In December of that year, the local police released a statement saying they had not found enough evidence to charge Liu.
In April 2019, the same University of Minnesota student filed a civil suit against Richard, claiming that he had forced himself upon her in his vehicle after dinner and later raped her at her apartment. JD.com filed a motion to dismiss, which the judge denied. Both JD.com and Liu are named defendants in the lawsuit. Less than two days before the trial was set to begin, Richard reached a settlement with the student.
