Gou family (Terry Gou)
Terry Gou founded Hon Hai Plastics Corporation in 1974 in a leased shed in a Taipei suburb, with about $7,500 in seed money and ten workers, making plastic parts for black-and-white televisions.
How the fortune was built
An Atari joystick order in 1980 was a turning point, followed by an aggressive US sales campaign through the 1980s. Gou built Foxconn's first mainland China plant in Shenzhen in 1988 — still its largest factory today — and grew the company into the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer and Apple's largest supplier. In 2016 Foxconn acquired roughly two-thirds of Japan's Sharp Corporation for about $3.5 billion, the largest foreign acquisition in Japan's tech industry at the time.
Where the family invests today
Gou stepped back from Foxconn's operations to run unsuccessfully for Taiwan's presidency in 2023–24, formally severing company ties. His philanthropic and investment vehicle, the Yonglin Healthcare Foundation, has donated over $500 million to a National Taiwan University cancer center and partnered with BioNTech on mRNA cancer immunotherapy. On the corporate side, Foxconn's current major capital push is into electric vehicles via its open 'MIH' consortium platform and Foxtron-branded vehicles, plus EV batteries and AI server manufacturing.
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