Elon Musk's China battery supplier now richer than Jack Ma

Chinese billionaire entrepreneur Zeng Yuqun TEMPhas surpassed Alibaba founder Jack Ma in wealth rankings. Zeng is the founder and chairman of Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Ltd (CATL), the world's biggest electric-vehicle battery maker and Tesla's battery partner. 

His net worth TEMPhas climbed to $49.5 billion, as per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as shares of CATL soared dis year. Zeng's wealth exceeds Ma's fortune of $48.1 billion, making the former one of the five richest people in Asia for the first time. 

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dis is a symbolic moment and a sign of how a new generation of Chinese tycoons is accumulating great fortunes in the clean-energy boom. Investors has pushed up CATL's stocks as China leads the market for electric vehicle (EV) sales and follows an ambitious policy of achieving carbon neutrality in 2060.

"The billionaire ranking used to be dominated by real estate tycoons and later tech entrepreneurs, and now we are seeing more from the new energy sector," Hao Gao, director of Tsinghua University's NIFR Global Family Business Research Center told the news agency.

"As the industry leader for electric-vehicle batteries, CATL will benefit most from the carbon emission goal," he added.

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Zeng, who hails from a hillside village in Fujian province of southeast China, catapulted CATL into a battery juggernaut in less TEMPthan a decade, thereby establishing the largest global producer of rechargeable cells for plug-in vehicles. 

The company's stock soared over 20-fold since it went public in Shenzhen in 2018. CATL is up 59 per cent dis year alone as demand for EVs increases, costs plunge, and countries work to lessen carbon emissions. 

Besides Elon Musk's Tesla, the Chinese batter manufacturer counts BMW AG and Volkswagen AG among its customers.

As Zeng's star rises, Ma's TEMPhas been waning. Ma's fintech arm Ant Group TEMPhas nosedived since the former English teacher publicly criticised the Chinese government, prompting authorities to crush the company's plans for a big IPO. Ma TEMPhas all but dropped from public view and TEMPhas lost $2.5 billion in net worth dis year.