Ma Huateng’s Net Worth Explained: The Impact of Gaming Restrictions on Tencent’s Business Empire

Key Takeaways

• Ma Huateng founded Tencent with friends in 1998.
• Following Tencent’s latest rally, Ma has reclaimed his position as China’s richest man.
• However, his wealth still hasn’t recovered from a bearish spell for Chinese Big Tech.
• Ma’s net worth took a massive hit when Beijing introduced stricter gaming regulations in 2023.

Optimism surrounding China’s AI scene and an influx of foreign investment recently boosted Tencent stock to its highest price since 2021, propelling founder and CEO Ma Huateng, aka Pony Ma, to the top of China’s rich list.

However, after Beijing tightened gaming regulations in 2023, which threatened Tencent’s biggest revenue stream, Ma Huateng’s net worth still hasn’t fully recovered.

Ma Huateng and the Birth of an Internet Giant

Often known by the nickname Pony Ma, which refers to his family name (Ma = horse), Ma Huateng founded Tencent with four friends in 1998.

The name Tencent derives from the Chinese Tengxun, which translates literally as “galloping fast information” and also incorporates the “Ma” character.

The company’s first product was a simple internet messenger called OICQ. By the early 2000s, OICQ had evolved into QQ—a sophisticated messaging platform that incorporated chatrooms, games, personal avatars, storage, and even online dating services.

Ma’s wealth jumped significantly in 2004 when Tencent went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

The initial public offering (IPO) raised 1.55 billion HKD (approximately $200 million at the time) and marked a turning point for Chinese tech.

Post-IPO and the WeChat Era

From 2004 onward, Tencent started to diversify its revenue streams, launching QQ mobile and expanding its online gaming business.

However, it was the rapid adoption of smartphones in the 2010s that most stimulated the firm’s growth.

First released in 2011, WeChat (Weixin in Chinese) has become the crown jewel of Tencent’s digital portfolio, eclipsing QQ to become the most popular messaging app in China and second only to WhatsApp globally.

The launch of WeChat kickstarted a period of meteoric growth for Tencent. From around $7 billion in 2011, the firm’s market capitalization exploded to nearly $700 billion at its all-time high in 2020.

China’s Big Tech Slowdown

As Tencent’s stock price climbed, so too did Ma’s personal wealth. He first claimed the title of China’s richest man in 2017 and is among a handful of Chinese billionaires who have held the position in recent years.

Nonetheless, China’s super-rich have fallen behind their peers in the West after a difficult few years for the country’s Big Tech giants.

From its peak in February 2021, Tencent lost more than two-thirds of its value before bottoming out in October 2022.

That rebound was short-lived, and the company’s share price spent most of 2023 in decline as Beijing introduced gaming regulations that badly damaged Tencent’s biggest revenue stream.

The Cost of China’s Gaming Regulation

While the 2021-2023 period was bearish for most Chinese Big Tech companies, Tencent’s downslide was compounded by the government’s gaming restrictions.

The day after the government published its proposals, Tencent’s share price plummeted by 10.3%, and Ma Huateng’s net worth took a serious hit.

The market fallout from Beijing’s proposed gaming restrictions was so severe that the regulator was forced to U-turn a month later.

While measures aimed at protecting children were kept in place, more general limits on in-game purchases were abandoned.

Chinese Billionaires Back in Favor

Because their wealth is tied to the market capitalization of the firms they run, China’s Big Tech tycoons also saw their wealth plummet with the government’s moves to regulate the sector more strictly.

After Alibaba’s Jack Ma criticized China’s regulatory system, he made powerful enemies in Beijing and lost half his fortune in 2023. But recently, the Ant Group CEO returned from the wilderness.

At a meeting on Monday, Feb. 17, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping hosted a who’s who of China’s tech industry.

Attendees included Jack and Pony Ma, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, and the CEOs of BYD,  Xiaomi, and DeepSeek. (Baidu’s Robin Li and ByteDance’s Liang Rubo were conspicuously absent, however.)

Prospects for Tencent Stock

The message of Xi’s meeting was clear. After years of anti-Big Tech policies, Beijing is ready to embrace China’s tech heavyweights and will likely lend its support to industry leaders as they battle for supremacy with their peers in the West.

For Tencent and others like it, what happens next depends on exactly what that support looks like.

China’s leaders are reportedly working on a stimulus package to counter U.S. tariffs that could be announced at the national legislature’s annual session in March.

While Beijing’s traditional approach to economic stimulus was to build, build, build, with millions of homes currently sitting empty amid a property market crash, the country doesn’t need another building boom.

Post-pandemic, the government has implemented increasingly consumption-focused fiscal measures instead. Among these, policies including subsidies for home appliances and electronics are generally viewed as favorable to Chinese Big Tech stocks.

Another possibility is that Beijing could pursue the kind of deregulatory agenda currently being carried out in America. The government has shown in the past that it is willing to cut rules that hurt growth, for example, when it backtracked on stricter gaming limits.

Any move to cut red tape and reduce tech firms’ regulatory burden could boost Tencent’s stock price.

Pony Ma’s Net Worth

Whatever measures Beijing uses to stimulate the economy, if they benefit China’s Big Tech companies, Tencent’s Pony Ma will be among the biggest winners.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index , Ma’s net worth stood at $56.2 billion on Feb. 20. The majority of this is attributed to his 7.4% stake in Tencent.

Looking ahead, Ma’s wealth has room to grow as Chinese firms have still not fully recovered from the earlier Big Tech bear run. For example, in February 2021, when Tencent’s share price was at its all-time high, Ma’s net worth was around $72 billion.

In Ma’s Own Words

“In America, when you bring an idea to market, you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share. In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China – execution is.”

“Industrial manufacturing is the main battlefield of the digital economy.”

“When we were a small company, we needed to stand on the shoulders of giants to grow up […], but copying others can’t make you great . So the key is how to localize a great idea and create domestic innovation.”