The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Changpeng Zhao
It was the tweet that blew up a multibillion-dollar bank. When Changpeng Zhao, chief executive of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, told his 7.7 million followers in November that he was selling off all assets tied to rival exchange FTX, he triggered a digital bank run that exposed gaping holes in FTX’S finances and helped bring a company once worth $32 billion (£27 billion) crashing down into bankruptcy.
The 45-year-old Canadian would later insist that he had not meant to spook the market, apologising for ‘any turmoil [he] caused’. Nevertheless, FTX’S downfall left Zhao – an outwardly humble and obsessively secretive engineer known to his fans as CZ, who splits his time between London, Singapore, Tokyo and Hong Kong – as the unchallenged king of cryptocurrency. In 2023, he could either ride the chaos to new levels of power or become its next big casualty.
Zhao was 12 years old and spoke no English when his family fled China for Vancouver in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. He queued with his mother outside the Canadian embassy for 36 hours to get a visa. Teenage jobs at Mcdonald’s and a petrol station gave way to a degree in computer science, and ultimately, in 2017, founding Binance – a crypto exchange that lets users swap between more than 350 cryptocurrencies as well as traditional ‘fiat’ money.
Today Binance boasts around 120 million registered users and handles $76 billion in trades every day. CZ has become a hero in the crypto community, regularly responding to fans and critics directly on Twitter. He claims to eschew personal luxury and extravagance, owning no houses or cars.
Yet Zhao keeps his actual business murky, refusing to say which country Binance is even headquartered in. US officials are reportedly probing it for money-laundering breaches, while investigative reporters have accused it of plotting to deceive regulators and turning a blind eye to cyber crime (Binance denies these claims). The implosion of FTX and the collapse in crypto prices – which slashed Zhao’s net worth from $97 billion to as low as $15 billion – will also push legislators across the world to crack down on the industry. Undaunted, Zhao has wasted no time in positioning himself as the responsible face of crypto, declaring that he would start a global trade association and a recovery fund for future crashes.
Other names to watch include Sam Altman, head of the artificial intelligence research firm Openai, whose automated painting and writing software made shocking leaps forward in 2022. And General Motors boss Mary Barra, who is pivoting the 114-year-old car-maker hard into electric vehicles. Her chief rival Elon Musk, having staked much of his fortune on building ‘Twitter 2.0’, has all but burned the old version to the ground through a combination of impulsivity, despotism and galactic self-confidence. If he succeeds next year it will be partly thanks to CZ, who invested $500 million in Musk’s buyout, then declared, ‘Don’t ask me about a plan. Never had a plan for Binance. Entrepreneurs don’t plan.’