Su Hua

A rural childhood was followed by elite technical training and search engineering

Su grew up in Hunan province, and contemporary reporting described his home village as lacking electricity until the late 1990s. He learned programming while young and later studied computer software at Tsinghua University, graduating in 2005. ^[3][1]

Before Kuaishou, Su worked as an engineer at Google China and then at Baidu. Those roles gave him experience in large-scale search, advertising and recommendation systems before he joined the company that would become his main source of wealth. ^[1]

Su joined the Kuaishou group in 2013, two years after Cheng Yixiao had launched the original GIF-focused product. Kuaishou says Su introduced a recommendation-algorithm mechanism and, together with Cheng, initiated the company's short-video business. ^[2][1]

Short video scale turned co-founder equity into a public-market fortune

Under Su and Cheng, Kuaishou expanded from a simple media-sharing application into a large short-video and live-streaming platform. Su served as chief executive until 2021 and remained responsible for major strategic decisions as the company broadened its products and commercial model. ^[2][1]

Kuaishou listed in Hong Kong in 2021, creating a public valuation for Su's controlling founder stake. Forbes reporting that year put his ownership near 12%, making the value of equity in the platform he helped scale the direct mechanism behind his billionaire fortune. ^[3][2]