Top 100 Executives 2020 – Robin Li, CEO, Baidu

On either side of the Pacific, the story of the audacious self-made tech billionaire, who starts out with nothing but a kernel of a bright idea, is a common tale, and for China’s 35th richest man its no different, except for the incidental fact that genesis of this tech giant took place not in an Ivy League college dorm or a suburban Californian garage, but a Beijing hotel room, where, in 1998 in the presence of cofounder Eric Xu, Baidu first saw the light of day.

Made in America

For Li, the journey to becoming a titan of tech started at the beginning of the nineties. In 1992, after picking up an IT degree from Beijing University, he obtained a scholarship to study at SUNY Buffalo, in New York state. It was during this time that he met Melissa Dongmin Ma, who would go on to become the mother of his four children.
 

In the mid-nineties, and now a specialist in algorithms, he began his career at a subsidiary of Dow Jones & Company, all the while working on a personal side project in his spare time, a B2B search engine. In 1996 Li created the Rankdex site-scoring algorithm for search engine page ranking. It was the first search-engine ever to use hyperlinks to measure the quality of websites.
In concrete terms, the software, which would go on to power Baidu, proposed links to partner-firms’ sites, which paid handsomely for the privilege. Baidu eventually saw the light of day in early 2000, and two decades on accounts for 80% of all internet searches made in China in 2020.

"Li has been careful to stay in the good graces of the Communist party, a sine qua non for any CEO wishing to thrive in the Middle Kingdom"

But the ambitions of the 51-year-old go far beyond conquering the search engine market in his homeland. The future growth of the group is based on two main pillars: AI and autonomous vehicles. In order to advance in these areas, in 2017, Li pulled off an impressive coup by convincing Microsoft’s VP, and one of the world’s foremost experts on artificial intelligence, Qi Lu, to jump ship and join him at Baidu. In terms of anonymous vehicles, Baidu is, notably, working with some 50 partners, including Valeo and Real Time Innovations, on a driverless bus ptoject. Production of the 14-person vehicles, christened Apollo, began in 2017 and they are already in limited use at a number of airports around the world.

The Red Prince 
Li has been careful to stay in the good graces of the Communist party, a sine qua non for any CEO wishing to thrive in the Middle Kingdom. Like the other so-called ‘Red Princes’, such as Ma Huateng of Tencent, Li quickly came to realize that acquiescing to the wishes of the Beijing regime was his only play, if he wanted to retain power and influence in China.

In 2006, he launched Baidu Baike, a state-approved ‘Chinese Wikipedia’. Two years later, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, the Baidu search-engine removed French supermarket giant Carrefour from its results after France criticized China’s human right’s record.
Cementing his position as an establishment figure, Li was the driving force behind the creation of a federation of 300 Chinese tech entrepreneurs whose central tenet is to “support the core values of communism”.
Cheerleading for communism in order to amass a large personal fortune… Marx and Lenin must be turning in their graves.