
CATL Battery Billionaire And Wife Donate $137 Million To Fudan
Chinese EV battery billionaire Li Ping and his wife Liao Mei have decided to make a one-time donation of one billion yuan, or about $137 million, to Fudan University to support a new institute of advanced studies, the school said in an announcement on Tuesday.
Li is a 1985 graduate from the elite Shanghai-headquartered school's department of materials who went on to become vice chairman of Contemporary Amperex Technology, or CATL, one of the world's largest makers of EV batteries. Liao graduated from Fudan's history department in 1986.
The new institute, to be called the Xue Min Institute of Advanced Studies, aims to attract world-class scholars and focus on natural science and basic research, Fudan said.
Greater China, including mainland China and Hong Kong, accounted for nine of the top 20 billionaires in the world automotive industry on the 2025 Forbes Billionaires List released earlier this month. Among them, Li, a Hong Kong citizen, had an estimated fortune worth $7.3 billion.
Tesla's Elon Musk was the world's richest automotive industry billionaire with an estimated fortune worth $342 billion. CATL Chairman and CEO Robin Zeng came in second among the auto industry's richest with a fortune worth $37.9 billion. Wang Chuanfu, chairman of China's BYD – the world's biggest EV maker, ranked third at $26.4 billion.
(See related report by Forbes China here.)
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