Net Worth: $12.0 B

LAST YEAR: 6

CHANGE: 100%

AGE: 82

RESIDENCE: Rolling Hills

SOURCE OF WEALTH: Technology



THE MONEY: Tu owns a 50% stake in Kingston Technology Corp., a Fountain Valley-based computer equipment company he co-founded with David Sun in 1987 – the two reportedly met over a game of basketball. Kingston’s revenue last year was reportedly around $16.1 billion, up by more than $2 billion from 2021, against debt of around $2 billion. Compared to a handful of similar publicly traded companies, Kingston may be worth about $26 billion. Given that valuation, much higher than in previous years, Tu’s net worth took a correspondingly big jump. With approximately 3,200 employees, Kingston Technology was ranked in December as the nation’s 23rd largest private company. Tu and Sun sold 80% of Kingston to Japan’s SoftBank for $1.5 billion in 1996, then bought the company back for $450 million in 1999. Tu in 2020 invested $50 million in Fluxergy, an Irvine-based diagnostics company launched in 2013 that had developed a test that in one hour identifies the virus that causes Covid-19. This year, the John and Mary Tu Foundation donated $1 million to the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana.



THE BUZZ: Kingston remains one of the big names for computers, specifically in hard drive and dynamic random-access memory devices – the flash drive. The company announced this year it had shipped 100 million overclockable modules, which allow users to manually run computer hardware beyond factory settings for temporary boosts in performance and memory. Kingston is also reportedly downsizing its investments and assets in China. This year, the Asian American publication NextShark listed the Kingston founders among the 10 Asian American and Pacific Islander inventors and innovators who helped “improve the quality of everyone’s lives.”