David Sun and John Tu are having the kind of year most people only dream about. The Kingston Technology cofounders have watched their combined wealth balloon by $14 billion since January, a 44% jump that’s put them in rare air among the world’s richest people. We’re talking top 50 billionaire status. Not bad for two electrical engineers who started out selling computer memory.
The real kicker? They’re only behind Elon Musk, a couple of other ultra-wealthy titans, and that’s it. Even the Walton heirs, with their Walmart inheritance, haven’t gained as much ground this year.
When Taiwan Met California, and Business Happened
Sun and Tu’s origin story reads like a tech origin story should. Both emigrated to the US in the 1970s after studying electrical engineering. They ended up in Los Angeles, bonded over basketball, and decided to go into business together. That casual friendship turned into something pretty remarkable.
Their first company, Camintonn, launched in 1982 and sold for $6 million in 1986. Not life-changing money, but solid. Then Black Monday hit in 1987 and wiped them out. Most people would’ve called it quits. Not these two. They came back with Kingston Technology.
The trajectory matters here. They sold 80% of Kingston to SoftBank for $1.5 billion in 1996, then bought back their stake for $450 million in 1999. That buyback decision? Absolutely genius in retrospect.
The Memory Supercycle is Real
Here’s what’s driving all this wealth creation: artificial intelligence companies are in a desperate scramble for memory chips. Companies building massive data centers need storage at scales we’ve never really seen before. The shortage has been severe enough to push prices through the roof.
This “memory supercycle” isn’t some theoretical concept. Look at Micron Technology’s stock price over the past year. It’s more than quadrupled. The company is now valued at $470 billion, which puts it ahead of companies like Mastercard, Oracle, Costco, Bank of America, and Home Depot. Let that sink in for a second. A memory chip maker is more valuable than most of the Fortune 500.
Kingston, being privately held and a leading memory manufacturer, sits right at the center of this explosion. Sun and Tu own it 50-50, and that ownership stake is now worth around $45 billion each, putting them at spots 45 and 46 on the global wealth rankings.
The Luck-Meets-Timing Equation
Here’s something worth thinking about: Sun and Tu have been in the memory business for decades. They weren’t suddenly discovered this year. The difference is what changed around them. AI happened. Data centers exploded. The world suddenly needed what they’d been making all along.
That’s not entirely luck, but it’s not purely genius either. They stayed the course in an industry that most people ignore. They made smart decisions about buybacks and ownership. They bet on a commodity that turned out to matter more than anyone expected.
And yet you still don’t see their faces on magazine covers the way you do Musk’s, or hear their names in casual conversation about billionaires. Kingston operates quietly, its products embedded in devices millions of people use every day without thinking about it.
Maybe that’s the real success story here. Building something that matters so much that AI giants can’t function without it, and doing it so competently that nobody needs to constantly talk about you.
