A former Google employee was briefly classified as the second richest person in China, following an increase in sales in his e-commerce business, Pinduoduo.
Colin Huang was valued at $ 45.4 billion (£ 36.4 billion) by Forbes on Sunday in front of Alibaba's Jack Ma but behind Tencent's Pony Ma.
Mr. Huang was previously an intern at Microsoft and then spent three years as an engineer at Google.
"These three years have been incredibly valuable to me," he wrote on the blog in 2016.
"Google has given me much more than I contributed."
According to Forbes, an oversight in Pinduoduo's value has since returned Ma to second place.
Shopping games
Huang founded Pinduoduo in 2015.
And the company became especially popular in China during the Covid-19 pandemic, with orders going from 50 million to nearly 65 million per day.
Its new features include team buying, where customers come together to buy more units at a lower price.
Customers can also play on the site and are sometimes rewarded with giveaways.
In his 2016 blog, Huang said that some of Google's first employees were negatively affected and quickly became wealthy.
"They suddenly had too much money, lost incentives to work and started looking for new careers and fun," he wrote.
"Many years have passed and they have lost their most precious time, when they most likely had other exceptional results."
Huang still has a way to keep up with the richest tech billionaire in the world, Jeff Bezos.
Forbes currently estimates that the Amazon founder is worth $ 162.2 billion.
