Pony Ma

Ma Huateng, known as Pony Ma, is a Chinese businessman born in 1971 in Chaoyang, Shantou, Guangdong, who grew up partly in Shenzhen after his father took a port management job there. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and applied engineering from Shenzhen University in 1993 and worked on pager software and internet calling services before co-founding Tencent with four classmates in 1998. Tencent launched OICQ in 1999, a free instant messaging service modeled on ICQ that passed one million registered users by the end of that year. He is co-founder, chairman and chief executive of Tencent, a Shenzhen-based technology, gaming, entertainment and financial services conglomerate, and Time magazine named him among the world's most influential people in 2007, 2014 and 2018.