Hong Kong Billionaire Li Ka-Shing: An In-Depth Interview

Hong Kong Billionaire Li Ka-Shing: An In-Depth Interview

11 daily habits of self-made billionaires anyone can adopt

If you want to get rich, start by studying the people who have already done so.

“The only person who can teach you how to think like a millionaire is a millionaire,” writes Steve Siebold in his book, “How Rich People Think.”

The same could be said about billionaires.

Below, we’ve rounded up 11 habits of self-made billionaires. You may notice that none of them require dramatic life changes — a few tweaks here and there to your daily routine could result in huge gains.

They meditate

Science says that meditation has a number of mental and physical health benefits, from improving memory to boosting the immune system.

Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, told The Huffington Post, “Meditation, more than anything in my life, was the biggest ingredient of whatever success I’ve had.”

Dalio is not alone. Jack Dorsey, CEO of both Twitter and Square, and media mogul Oprah Winfrey say that they practice meditation daily.

They’re charitable

“The world class set their sights on impacting the world with their wealth,” Siebold writes. “Some do it through philanthropy, others through business or various financial vehicles.”

A handful of billionaires have taken to philanthropy, including founder and CEO of Bloomberg Media Michael Bloomberg, who has donated $3 billion over his lifetime.

And then there’s the Giving Pledge, which Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates created in order to invite the world’s wealthiest people to pledge more than half of their wealth to charitable causes either during their lives or in their wills. Some have even pledged to give away more than 99% of their fortunes.

They wake up early

There may be some truth behind the age-old adage, the early bird get the worm.

The wealthiest people tend to be early risers. Take Jack Dorsey, who wakes up at 5:00 a.m. to meditate and work out. Or Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, who wakes up at 5:45 a.m. to exercise before starting his work day.

Branson and Dorsey aren’t the only successful people who wake up before the sun. In his five-year study of rich people, author Thomas C. Corley found that nearly 50% of them woke up at least three hours before their workday actually began.

They stick to routines

A hallmark of highly successful people is their dedication to ritual.

Take John Paul DeJoria, cofounder of Patron tequila and Paul Mitchell hair products, who starts every day with five minutes of quiet reflection.

“Doesn’t matter where I’m at, which home I’m in, or what hotel room I’m visiting,” he says. “The very second I wake up, I stay in bed for about five minutes and just be.”

They live below their means

Just because they have billions in the bank doesn’t mean they have to indulge in overspending — in fact, some of the world’s wealthiest people choose to live frugally.

As Murray Newlands wrote at Entrepreneur, “Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, famously drove around in a 1979 Ford F150 pickup truck … Mark Zuckerberg owns a modest $30,000 Acura TSX entry-level sedan … Bill Gates was known to fly commercial for years.”

Then there’s legendary investor Warren Buffett, who is notably down to earth — he still lives in the same $31,500 home, and chooses a flip phone over a smart phone.

They pursue their passion

“You’ve got to find what you love,” Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said during his 2005 commencement address to the graduates of Stanford University. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

Jobs isn’t the first to emphasize the importance of pursuing your passion. Author Napoleon Hill, who studied over 500 incredibly rich people in the early 20th century, wrote in his bestseller, “Think and Grow Rich“: “No man can succeed in a line of endeavor which he does not like.”

They read

Many of the world’s most successful people are avid readers.

As Business Insider’s Shana Lebowitz wrote:

Investing legend Warren Buffett reportedly spends about 80% of his day reading, and continues to include book recommendations in his annual shareholder letters.

In 2015, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg resolved to read a book every two weeks … Media mogul Oprah Winfrey selects a book every month for readers to discuss online as part of “Oprah’s Book Club 2.0,” and when tech billionaire Elon Musk is asked how he learned to build rockets, he reportedly answers, “I read books.”

They develop multiple streams of income

The richest people focus on earning — so it comes as no surprise that they develop additional streams of income.

Richard Branson, the billionaire chair of the Virgin Group, epitomizes this habit, Corley explains in “Change Your Habits, Change Your Life.” Branson has overseen about 500 companies and his brand is on somewhere between 200 and 300 of them. 

Branson “puts the rich habit of having multiple streams of income on steroids,” Corley writes. “His desire to expand the Virgin brand is really a desire to expand his streams of income. Branson learned very early on that this rich habit creates the most wealth.”

They’re self-employed

Along the same lines, billionaires tend to be their own bosses. They’re typically self-employed and determine the size of their own paycheck.

Mark Zuckerberg has been working for himself since age 19, when he first launched Facebook as a Harvard sophomore in 2004. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, who is the youngest billionaire in the world, had a similar path — he created the popular photo-sharing app with two of his former Stanford classmates and has been his own boss ever since.

“It’s not that there aren’t world-class performers who punch a time clock for a paycheck, but for most this is the slowest path to prosperity, promoted as the safest,” says self-made millionaire Steve Siebold, who has also studied over 1,200 wealthy individuals. “The great ones know self-employment is the fastest road to wealth.”

They exercise

Highly successful people don’t just push themselves in the office — they push themselves physically, outside of the office.

Mark Cuban, “Shark Tank” investor and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, does cardio for at least an hour, six to seven days a week, he told The Dallas Morning News.

Branson credits exercise for giving him at least four additional hours of productivity each day. Science concurs: Working out can boost your memory, concentration, and mental sharpness.

They hang out with other successful people

The wealthiest people like to stand next to the smartest person in the room, notes author and podcast host James Altucher: “Harold Ramis did it (Bill Murray). Steve Jobs did it (Steve Wozniak). Craig Silverstein did it (Who? Larry Page). Kanye West did it (Jay-Z).”

After all, “In most cases, your net worth mirrors the level of your closest friends,” Siebold explains.

Read more at http://www.businessinsider.sg/habits-of-self-made-billionaires-2016-4/#y5sA1wy3Jd3XjuLy.99

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Robert Kuok – The world’s shrewdest businessman

Kuok Cools on China as Tycoon Exits Hong Kong Media

Traditional Asian business leaders appear to be giving way to homegrown Chinese billionaires hungry for acquisitions.

Robert Kuok's move to sell ​Hong Kong's leading English-language newspaper, the South China Morning Post, to Chinese Internet giant Alibaba may be the start of a new trend of tycoons selling their assets in China.

HONG KONG—Malaysia’s richest man, Robert Kuok, built his fortune by transforming his father’s sugar-trading business into a property-to-logistics empire focused on China, securing prime real estate after being an early foreign investor and loyal friend to Beijing.
Now, Mr. Kuok’s decision to sell his media assets in the Chinese special administrative region of Hong Kong to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. reflects a potential changing of the guard as traditional Asian tycoons, whose investments helped forge China’s economic success, give way to a new breed of homegrown, acquisition-hungry billionaires who come from within the Chinese system.

The 92-year-old Mr. Kuok has also considered selling some of his real-estate holdings in China and Hong Kong, people familiar with the matter said, as a slowing economy and rising competition have weighed on results. Profit fell last year at seven publicly traded companies in Mr. Kuok’s portfolio, although most saw an upturn in the first half of this year.

Mr. Kuok’s flagship Kerry Properties Ltd. has cut back the amount of property under development in China every year since 2012, according to company filings. Separately, Mr. Kuok’s luxury hotel chain, Shangri-La, has been impacted in China by lower revenue amid a persistent anticorruption campaign, with profits slumping 54% last year to $181 million. Increasingly, Shangri-La is opening in locations further afield, from London to Istanbul, and is planning more openings in India, the Philippines, Qatar and Sri Lanka.

Mr. Kuok’s companies are also building up their networks in Africa and Oceania, including constructing a large, mixed-use development near the airport in Accra, Ghana. The shift to a more global focus is reminiscent of Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, whose downsizing of his exposure to China and Hong Kong in favor of billion-dollar assets in Europe stirred criticism from China’s media earlier this year.

“You should see quite a number of Hong Kong businessmen trimming their China businesses in the next year or two, because profitability in China is declining,” said Eric Huang, partner of property-investment firm HCG Capital Partners, who has worked with wealthy Hong Kong families.

However, older tycoons with long-held investments in China are likely to sell at a measured pace, analysts say, wary of being seen to be reducing support for China. Mr. Kuok is likely to remain heavily committed to China, according to people familiar with his thinking.

Mr. Kuok and the Kerry Group companies didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Over the past few years, new Chinese billionaires have increasingly sought assets outside of mainland China as they look to diversify and broaden their investments. One of the more high-profile acquisitions in recent years has been U.S. theater chain AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., which was purchased by Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin’s Dalian Wanda Group in 2012. Some mainland billionaires are taking Chinese assets off the hands of Hong Kong tycoons. Earlier this month, Hong Kong billionaire Cheng Yu-tung’s New World China Land sold three Chinese property projects to mainland billionaire Xu Jiayin’s Evergrande Group.

By investing in logistics and infrastructure in Southeast Asia and Africa, Mr. Kuok is also tapping into Beijing’s more recent plans. The government wants to grow Chinese companies overseas and increase trade and influence through its “One Belt, One Road” initiative that spans dozens of countries as far as Europe.

Mr. Kuok’s firms are now reapplying his China strategy in other emerging markets, brokers and analysts said.
“They assist the local government and its people in developing the cities,” said Terence Tang, managing director at Collier International Capital Markets in Asia, who has worked with the Kuok family. “Thus, they are very much welcomed by the governments from these emerging markets.”

Mr. Kuok initially built his empire on sugar, as tycoons in Southeast Asia focused on traditional industries such as commodities, shipping and infrastructure in the 1970s and 1980s. He first advised Chinese leaders how to resolve a sugar shortage in 1973, according to an academic paper written by Malaysian professors. When Deng Xiaoping announced economic reforms in the late 1970s, Mr. Kuok was among the first tycoons to invest in China.

Mr. Kuok is known for developing close relationships with political leaders, including Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew, said Lee Poh Ping, a professor at the University of Malaysia who has studied the tycoon.

Mr. Kuok began developing the landmark China World Trade Center in Beijing in the mid-1980s, now one of many flagship developments in prime locations in first-tier cities. After some foreign businesses pulled out of China and Hong Kong after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, when the army violently crushed student protests, Mr. Kuok continued to invest in China as a political statement to show that he wasn’t worried about the country, Mr. Lee said.

In 1993, Mr. Kuok expanded into Hong Kong’s media industry by purchasing a stake in the publisher of the English-language South China Morning Post from News Corp., parent of The Wall Street Journal. The paper proved to be a cash cow in the 1990s, stacked with company notices, job listings and advertisements. He bought a bigger stake in the company in 2007.

Managing the South China Morning Post, however, has gotten more complicated in recent years, as anti-Beijing tensions have flared up in Hong Kong and the Internet has decimated traditional advertising revenues. The newspaper has been blamed by Western media-watchers for not being tough enough on Beijing, yet at the same time, it has been blocked in China for coverage disapproved of by Chinese authorities.

“The newspaper has declined in the past few years,” said Ying Chan, director of Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong. “Robert Kuok was happy to sell.”

Mr. Kuok told Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper in an interview last month that the sale was purely a “business decision.”

Write to Wei Gu at wei.gu@wsj.com and Wayne Ma at wayne.ma@wsj.com

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The fascinating life of Elon Musk, captured in one giant infographic

A good overview of Elon Musk, the next Steve Job...

From getting bullied and thrown down the stairs in grammar school to becoming “Earth’s most future-oriented person” and earning billions of dollars in the process, it’s hard to wrap one’s brain around just how much Elon Musk has managed to stuff into his 44 years of life. But that’s where this massive infographic, created by information designer Anna Vital, comes in. Read the full article.

“In a hundred years, when most people reading this and the person writing this are long gone, Musk’s cars and rockets will still be circling the Earth and the skies,” writes Anna Vital from the Funders and Founders blog. “How can such a person get started against all odds is the question I ask here. And, more importantly, what can we learn from him?”

The illustrated life’s journey, which leans heavily on Ashlee Vance’s book, winds through several milestones and inflection points, like when Musk sold his first videogame and the time he left Stanford’s PhD program after just two days.

And, of course, it also mentions how Musk, after reading “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” decided his life’s mission would be to save humanity.

Those are just a few of the highlights. It’s a huge visualization , so we broke it down into some notable sections.

The rough early years, capped by a nice profit at the age of 12:

A youthful existential crisis and getting his hands dirty:

A formal education and some dues-paying:

Grappling with tragedy, pondering Tesla and making the bucks:

Still to come:

For now, Musk is basking in the glow of what looks to be a huge success with the upcoming Model 3, a more affordable Tesla TSLA, +1.05%  aimed at the mass market. The company has already taken in hundreds of thousands of preorders for a car that won’t be delivered until 2017 at the earliest.