John Tu

John Tu (; born August 12, 1941) is a Taiwanese-American billionaire businessman and philanthropist. As of June 2026, Tu is worth over $103 billion, making him the 20th richest person in the world per Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He is the co-founder of Kingston Technology.

Early life and education John Tu was born in Chongqing, China in 1941. He was the son of an official in China's Nationalist government. He moved to Shanghai with his parents in 1945, before going to Taiwan two years later as the Chinese Civil War neared the coast.

Tu moved in 1960 to West Germany to study electrical engineering, and was educated at a language school in Munich. In Germany at that time, a two-year apprenticeship was required for everyone, so he worked at a shipbuilding factory. After working there for two years, he studied electrical engineering at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt in Germany and graduated in 1970. He then went to work for Motorola in Wiesbaden, Germany. In 1971 he moved to California. In 1996, they sold 80 percent of the company to Softbank for $1.5 billion, before buying it back in 1999 for $450 million.

Philanthropy In 2021 Tu made a donation to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation that enabled the Pulitzer Prize-winning Storm Lake (Iowa) Times to buy its local competition and a weekly in an adjoining county. He has supported Erin Gruwell's Freedom Writers and the Freedom Writers Foundation. In 2011, he donated $1.2 million to give every first year medical student at UC Irvine an iPad.

Personal life He is married with two children.