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Grizzly Bulls’ Billionaires Index

⬅ # 204 Marcel Telles|# 206 Harry Stine ➡

# 205 John Tu 

$10.7B

Real Time Net Worth
as of 5/13/2024

# 205 John Tu 

$10.7B

Real Time Net Worth
as of 5/13/2024
OccupationPresident, Kingston Technology
Source of WealthComputer Hardware
Age82
ResidenceRolling Hills, California
Marital StatusMarried
Children2
EducationBS, Technische Universität Darmstadt
Age-Adjusted Net Worth$2.42B
John Tu
John Tu
United States
Net worth: $10.7B

Self-Made Score 

Wealth History

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Biography

Biographical Info

John Tu, born on August 12, 1941, in Chongqing, China, is a Chinese-American billionaire businessman and philanthropist.
His parents moved to Shanghai in 1945, and two years later, during the Chinese civil war, they relocated to Taiwan.
In 1960, John Tu moved to Germany to study electrical engineering despite not knowing German initially. He completed a two-year apprenticeship at a shipbuilding factory before graduating in 1970 from the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt.
Tu started his career at Motorola in Wiesbaden, Germany, before immigrating to California in 1971.
In 1982, he co-founded Camintonn with David Sun, and in 1986, they sold it for $6 million, subsequently founding Kingston Technology.
In 1996, they sold 80 percent of Kingston Technology to Softbank for $1.5 billion, later repurchasing it in 1999 for $450 million.

Business Ventures

John Tu currently runs Kingston Technology, a company specializing in storage and memory products. Interestingly, he operates the firm from a cubicle on the sales floor.
After losing a substantial amount in the stock market in 1987, Tu and Sun founded Kingston to manufacture surface-mount memory chips.
He invested $50 million in Fluxergy, a medical tech startup that developed a rapid diagnostic test for COVID-19.

Philanthropy

In 2021, John Tu made a significant donation to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation, facilitating the purchase of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Storm Lake (Iowa) Times and a weekly in an adjoining county.
He has been a supporter of Erin Gruwell's Freedom Writers and the Freedom Writers Foundation.
In 2011, Tu donated $1.2 million to provide every first-year medical student at UC Irvine with an iPad.

Personal Life

John Tu is married and has two children.
He enjoys playing drums with his band, JT and California Dreamin'.

How long would it take you to become as rich as John Tu?

If you started with $10,000 and invested an additional $500 each month at a 44.01% CAGR, it would take you 5 years to reach John Tu's net worth of $10.7B.

Is this realistic? It depends how closely the VIX-TA-Macro Advanced model performs to its history in the future. Since Grizzly Bulls launched on January 1, 2022, it's returned 40.45% compared to 10.08% for the S&P 500 benchmark.

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John Tu is very wealthy, but what's stopping you from reaching that same level of success? As summarized in our five fundamental rules to wealth building, becoming wealthy in a modern capitalist economy is not complicated. There's actually only three variables:

  1. Your starting capital
  2. Your earnings after expenses
  3. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of your savings

Most people start with zero or very little, so if you weren't born into wealth, don't fret! The majority of the fortunate folks listed in our Grizzly Bulls’ Billionaires Index came from middle class or lower backgrounds. The most distinguishing characteristic of the group is their ability to consistently earn a high CAGR on their savings.

Every billionaire has a unique strategy to achieve high CAGR. For John Tu, Computer Hardware is the primary source. Whether you choose to invest your savings in your own businesses or the businesses of others is not as important. The salient piece of the puzzle is ensuring that your hard-earned savings are generating sufficient CAGR to reach your long term goals.

Most people simply invest their money in index funds and call it a day. There's nothing wrong with this approach, but it guarantees relative mediocrity. To achieve greatness, you need to invest your money to earn higher than average returns. In the long run, better investors will always finish ahead of better earners.

Source: Grizzly Bulls reporting

Methodology: Grizzly Bulls' Billionaires Index is a daily ranking of the world's billionaires and richest people. Grizzly Bulls strives to provide the most accurate net worth calculations available. We pull data from public equity markets, SEC filings, public real estate records, and other reputable sources.

The index is dynamic and updates daily at the close of U.S. stock market trading based on changes in the markets, economy, and updates to Grizzly Bulls' proprietary algorithm of personal wealth calculation. Stakes in public companies are tracked daily based on the relevant closing prices of the underlying securities. Additionally, stakes in private companies, cash, real estate, and other less easily valued assets are updated periodically through careful analysis of insider transactions, comparable public company sales / EBITDA multiples, etc.

Edited by: Lee Bailey