Changpeng Zhao, popularly known as CZ, has hit the headlines all over the internet as Bloomberg Billionaires Index puts him at a higher spot than Asia's richest Mukesh Ambani.
CZ is the founder and CEO of the world's largest crypto exchange Binance and as per Bloomberg, he is now the 11th richest person on the earth. With a net worth of $96 billion, which does not include his crypto holdings, CZ is not just richer than Ambani, but he also stands close to Mark Zuckerberg and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Zhao was born in 1977 in China and later moved to Canada with his family, where he worked at Mcdonald's to support his family. He is a major in computer science from McGill University and has developed various software related to trading in his life. Between 2013 and 2017, CZ worked on some crypto projects before finally launching his own crypto exchange Binance, which has now become the world's biggest crypto exchange platform.
Binance could be worth as much as $300 billion as per a report from the Wall Street Journal, which is three times of the publicly traded Coinbase. Binance generated at least $20 billion of revenue last year, according to a Bloomberg analysis of its trading volume and fees. In one recent 24-hour span, Binance completed $170 billion of transactions. On a really slow day, he said, it’s about $40 billion — and that’s up from as little as $10 billion two years before that.
But that's not all, a significant part of CZ's net worth could be in Bitcoin and his own firm's Binance Coin which have not been taken into calculation by Bloomberg yet. From $5,000 in 2020, Bitcoin price has jumped to now trade at $42,000. Binance Coin also surged 1,300% in 2021.