From a man with a van in China who is now the country’s third-richest with his company SF Express, to Uber’s chief executive who got in an unfortunate tangle with a driver, to the founder Amazon founder’s high-flying ambitions in the rocket industry, today’s tycoons are getting things on the move. Our bi-weekly look at the world of billionaires:
Wang Wei
Shuttling parcels around for Ali­baba and other retailers is creating China’s latest wealth explosion, with a surge in shares of SF Express, making Wang Wei the country’s third-richest man.
The official launch of SF Express’s listing on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, pushed through rapidly with government support, helped to produce a 59 per cent surge in shares of parent SF Holding, giving Mr Wang a net worth of US$27.6 billion.
The son of a Russian interpreter for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, Mr Wang saw opportunity early in the trade across China’s border with Hong Kong. While his family immigrated to Hong Kong when he was a child, he later returned to mainland China to establish the business, financed by a loan of $13,000 from his father. He began with six delivery men (of which he was one) and a van.
"When SF started delivering packages in the 1990s, it was still an illegal business called ‘black delivery’," Mr Wang in 2011 told the official People’s Daily, the only interview he is known to have granted. "According to the regulations then, we would be fined if our operations were caught by postal officers, so we had to handle packages sneakily."
Now the courier operates 36 cargo aircraft and about 15,000 vehicles.
"I know the taste of being poor, of being discriminated against by people for being poor," Mr Wang has said. "My parents were university professors in the mainland, but their academic records were not recognised when we moved to Hong Kong when I was little. So we started from scratch."
The South China Morning Post said Mr Wang is known for being demanding, but also stands up for his people. During the IPO’s bell-ringing ceremony he called on his employees to "do more and talk less". Also invited to ring the bell was one of his employees who had been slapped in the face by the driver of a luxury car last year.
Travis Kalanick
Speaking of arguments with drivers, Uber Technologies is seeking a chief operating officer, making good on a pledge by Travis Kalanick to seek "leadership help" after his verbal altercation with a driver was caught on video.
Bloomberg estimates his net worth at $6.7bn.
The new hire will be, "a peer who can partner with me to write the next chapter in our journey," Mr Kalanick, the chief executive, said in a posting on the company’s website on Tuesday.
Uber has been in the limelight for all the wrong reasons this year. The ride-hailing app was criticised for undermining a taxi strike against Mr Trump’s immigration ban in January. In February, a former employee wrote a blog post about her experiences of sexual harassment while working for the company and Uber is also facing a lawsuit from Alphabet’s autonomous car company Waymo for allegedly stealing trade secrets.
The argument with the driver, made public late last month, was the last straw. A day after the video was released, Mr Kalanick wrote an email to his employees saying, "I need leadership help, and I intend to get it."
Jeff Bezos
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has a rocket company with the motto "gradatim ferociter," Latin for "step by step, ferociously."
Now Mr Bezos is applying that intensity toward making space travel more like hopping on an airplane.

Source: The National