30 Aspiring Facts You Probably Didn't Know About Terry Gou

Terry Gou, the founder and chairman of Foxconn, popularly known as the "Donald Trump of Taiwan," can be considered as the most popular person in Taiwan, being the third richest person. Here are some unique facts about the Taiwanese tycoon:

1.  Gou, along with his second wife Delia Tseng, has decided to give 90% of Gou's wealth away to charity.
2.  Since 2016, it has been widely reported that he was considering a 2020 Taiwanese presidential bid. The speculation continued till 2018.
3.  His company Foxconn employs 1.2 million people and is reportedly the largest private employer and exporter, in the entire world.
4.  He is said to have built whole cities for his employees to work in and even has chicken farms on site to lay eggs for the canteen.
5.  He is known to take a salary of just one Taiwanese dollar out of the business each year, and even pay his executives bonuses out of his own pocket using dividends from the company.
6.  Terry Gou - Guo Tai-ming was born on October 8, 1950, in Banqiao Township, Taipei to parents Guo Ling Rui, a career police officer and Chu Yung-Chen.
7.  The family initially lived in mainland China's Shanxi Province before the Chinese Civil War, but fled to Taiwan in the year 1949.
8.  He was the first child of the family, and has two younger brothers named Tai-Chiang Gou and Tony Gou. Both of his brothers are successful businessmen. He also has a sister named Tai-Ping Gou.
9.  Following his graduation, he worked in a rubber factory, working at a grinding wheel, and medicine plant until the age of 24.
10.  He even served as a shipping clerk for a period of two years. It was during his time as the shipping clerk, that he got a first-hand view of Taiwan’s booming export market.
11.  In the year 1974, he founded Hon Hai in Taiwan, with $7,500 loan from his mother, and ten elderly workers, in a rented shed in Tucheng, a suburb of Taipei.
12.  The first product made by his company was a channel-changing knob for black-and-white televisions.
13.  He had three years of vocational training under his belt and had served in the military, before starting his company Foxconn.
14.  He received an order from Atari, a French corporate, to make the console joystick in the year 1980, which was the breakthrough deal for his company Foxconn.
15.  He is known for his aggressive salesmanship, where in, he broke into companies uninvited, in an effort to get additional orders, despite the security blocking him multiple times.
16.  In an interview, he once revealed that Gou had to force Apple founder Steve Jobs to hand over a business card to him. Currently, Apple is one of their largest clients.
17.  In the year 1996, his company Hon Hai, which was later renamed as Foxconn, started building chassis for Compaq desktops. Following this, Gou started inking deals with HP, IBM and Apple, becoming the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer.
18.  He opened his first factory in mainland China, in Shenzhen, in the year 1988, where till date, stands his company's largest factory.
19.  He is the owner of the HMD Global, the company founded in the year 2016 to sell Nokia branded phones.
20.  Recently, he drew controversy, with his comment about employees, which was translated into English, that claimed his workforce to be one million animals. However, he has later claimed that the translation has been poor and his comment was translated totally out of context.
21.  In 2012, he, through Foxconn, acquired a 10 percent stake in the Japanese electronics company Sharp Corporation, for $806 million. He went on to take over the company, four years later, making it the first foreign takeover of a major Japanese electronics company.
22.  He married Serena Lin in the year 1950, and has two children - a son and a daughter, with her. Serena Lin died of breast cancer in the year 2005, at the age of 55.
23.  He, along with Serena Lin, founded an educational charity, in the year 2000, with the prime intention of giving awat one-third of his wealth to the charity.
24.  He reportedly bought a Roztěž castle near Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic for $30 million in the year 2002.
25.  His son is working in the film and real estate industries, while his daughter served in the financial sector. Following Serena Lin's death, his daughter Gou Xiao-ling assumed leadership in the educational charity.
26.  Two years after his first wife's death, his brother, Tony Tai-Cheng Gou, who was the appointed successor of Gou, died in a severe case of leukemia.
27.  He has had an extramarital affair with Chen Chung-mei, a bar girl in the 1990s. It was reported that a private investigator Hsu Ching-wei, videotaped the private life of Gou and Chen Chung-mei, to blackmail him for money. Gou had first agreed to pay, but during the meeting, had got the investigator arrested.
28.  He married choreographer Delia Tseng on July 26, 2008 and has three children with her. She is reportedly 24 years junior to him.
29.  At his wedding to Tseng, he reportedly shed his tuxedo jacket and did 30 push ups, in an effort to prove his virility.
30.  In the initial days of his career, he had a firm belief in electronics becoming a major part in the day-to-day activities of people. He was sure about his future success, and even spent many hours learning to write his name perfectly in English.
31.  Terry Gou Net Worth: $6.5 Billion