Many fans are curious about Richard Liu's financial success in April 2026. Our team analyzed the latest data to provide a clear picture of their income.
What Is Richard Liu's Net Worth?
Richard Liu was born Liu Qiangdong on March 10, 1973, in Suqian, Jiangsu, China. His parents were in the business of shipping coal from north China to the south. Richard attended primary school in the Jiangsu province and enrolled in the Department of Sociology at the Renmin University of China in 1992. However, because he feared his degree would not result in good job opportunities, he spent his free time learning computer programming. Liu graduated with a Bachelor of Laws in sociology in 1996 and later received an executive master of business administration from China Europe International Business School, Shanghai.
Liu dated Gong Xiaojing while attending the Renmin University of China. They broke up in 2003. In 2006, Richard had a son. The name of the mother is not publicly known, though some believe that Liu may have privately been married to her. In August 2015, Richard married Zhang Zetian, an internet celebrity. At the time, Liu was 41, while Zetian was 22. Their relationship started when Liu studied at Columbia University, and Zhang was an exchange student at Barnard College, which was affiliated with Columbia. Richard confirmed their relationship to the public through his social media platform. Their marriage was registered in August, and they held a wedding ceremony on October 1, 2015, in Sydney, Australia. They welcomed a daughter in March 2016.
Richard Liu is a Chinese businessman and entrepreneur who has a net worth of $8 billion. Richard Liu's company, JD.com, is one of the largest retailers in China, inspiring comparisons to Amazon.
Over the next years, JD.com continued to grow. The company applied to go public in the United States in January 2014. A few months later, on May 22nd, the date of JD.com's IPO, the stock price of the company rose about 15%. The company remains the second largest internet-company in the world and the largest e-commerce company in China. In April 2022, JD.com announced that Liu would be stepping down as CEO to be replaced by Lei Xu, the company's then-president.
Liu has been at the center of a number of scandals and controversies. On July 23, 2018, he was named to be the host of a party in Sydney that had happened three years before in 2015 at which a woman was raped. A guest of the party, Xu Longwei, was found guilty of seven charges, including having non-consensual sex with a woman he had met at Liu's apartment. Richard himself was not charged with a crime or accused of any wrongdoing so he asked for his name to be suppressed, though the Australian court denied this request.
By 2005, Liu had already received an offer to sell JD.com for 18 million yuan. He rejected the offer, confident he would be able to oversee the growth of the company over the coming years. In 2007, he employed a full-category strategy for the company, changing the company's business model from selling consumer electronics to a much larger variety of goods. It quickly became one of the leading e-commerce businesses in China, drawing comparisons to Amazon given its similar business model. Liu himself also has been compared to Amazon founderJeff Bezosas a self-made individual.
After graduating, Liu got a job with Japan Life, a Japanese health product enterprise. While there, he served as the director for computers, the director for business, and the logistics supervisor. In June 1998, he started his own business called Jingdong in an industrial park in Beijing. The company distributed magneto-optical products. After the SARS outbreak in 2003, Liu was forced to rethink his business model, as people were forced to stay at home and his brick-and-mortar stores were suffering. He decided to divert to an e-commerce model. In 2004, he launched his first retail website and then founded JD.com later that year. Richard closed all of his physical stores in 2005 and fully transitioned to the e-commerce model.
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Ultimately, Richard Liu's financial journey is a testament to their success.
Disclaimer: All net worth figures are estimates based on public data.