- Binance Changpeng Zhao ‘CZ’ is now worth $96 billion, according to Bloomberg.
- The former McDonald’s worker-turned-billionaire says he is “ready to give away almost all of his wealth before dying.”
- The new estimate puts CZ in a class close to centi-billionaires like Elon Musk, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s co-founder, Larry Page.
From tons of burgers to tens of billions, from the promising pantries of McDonald’s to the hallowed hallways of the world’s elite 1%, Changpeng Zhao has always had a knack for flipping things. Only this time he is greatly rewarded by his customers — all millions of them — who seem to be happy with his service on the platform.
Today, CZ, as he is fondly known all over crypto space, is estimated by Bloomberg to be worth $96 billion — just $4 billion short of the highly coveted $100 billion mark. The estimate, which is an outrageously distant cry from Forbes’s (2021) $1.9 billion valuation, puts into consideration other things left out by Forbes, like CZ’s personal assets, company valuation, stock, and crypto holdings.
The maxim ‘getting at the top is easy, remaining at the top is hard’ sits well with many crypto billionaires like CZ who found great fortune from tapping into an infant industry in the nick of time. But CZ didn’t just concatenate two Greek alphabets over a cup of espresso to create Binance.
It has been slow and tumultuous progress these last five years, one in which CZ admits to “once working from a cramped up space with tables blocking the restroom entry.” Now Binance is the biggest exchange in the world, despite being four years younger than distant competitors, Coinbase and Huobi.
When questioned about how he feels towards his fortune, an unperturbed CZ retorted he cares less “about wealth, money or rankings” and is “willing to give out almost all of his fortune before he dies “
More hurdles to climb
While CZ looks likely to close up on centi-billionaires like Tesla’s Elon Musk, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and Google co-founder, Larry Page, his company, Binance, must deal with a barrage of regulatory grievances soiling up its growing reputation. Now commercially outlawed from China, CZ has disclosed that he is active on the hunt for a welcoming country with cooperative regulations to nest Binance headquarters. Dubai and Singapore top the list.
Binance prides itself as a fully remote company, but this has been scented as a red flag for most countries who believe it is a way for the company to evade regulatory scrutiny.
Already the company has received a series of backlash from the UK, US, Germany, Canada, and Japan. The latest is an investigation by the Pakistani government for what it believes is a crypto scam worth millions of dollars by fraudulent applications linked to Binance wallets.
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