Changpeng “CZ” Zhao says his road to crypto riches didn’t begin on trading desks or in VC boardrooms—it started over a low-stakes poker game in Shanghai. In a recent All-In podcast interview, the Binance founder recounted first hearing about Bitcoin in mid-2013 while he was a junior partner at a Shanghai software and services firm. “One of my friends tells me, ‘Look, you got to look at this thing called Bitcoin,’” Zhao said. It took him roughly six months of reading the BitcoinTalk forum and probing the space before he felt he understood it. That initial nudge came from Ron Tao, then a China-based venture capitalist. The argument grew more forceful when Zhao encountered Bobby Lee—about to leave Walmart to join BTC China (BTCC) as CEO—who framed Bitcoin as an investment decision rather than a hobby. Lee told Zhao to put 10% of his net worth into Bitcoin: “There’s a small chance you will go to zero then you lose 10%. There’s a much higher chance you will go 10x and you’ll double your net worth.” That advice pushed Zhao to study the white paper more closely. By the time he felt comfortable with the technology, Bitcoin had already run—from about $70 in mid-2013 to roughly $1,000 by year-end—leaving Zhao convinced he’d “missed it.” Still, he decided not to sit out what he viewed as the second foundational technology of his working life after the internet. “I was 35, 36 — I wasn’t going to miss it,” he said, adding that the next comparable wave may be years away, pointing to AI. Zhao made a bold, tangible bet: he sold his Shanghai apartment—about $900,000 in proceeds—and bought Bitcoin in tranches. He recalled buying at around $800 before prices slid to $600 and then $400, averaging his cost to about $600 as the market dipped. Early social proof also mattered. A small December 2013 Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, where Zhao met early builders and miners (he name-checked figures such as Vitalik Buterin and Charlie Lee), convinced him the community wasn’t the “drug lords” caricature dominating headlines after the Silk Road arrests but “a bunch of kids, a bunch of geeks… very nice people.” Zhao’s ascent wasn’t a single windfall. It was a sequence: accumulating Bitcoin, taking operating roles at early crypto firms including Blockchain.info and OKCoin, building exchange infrastructure, and eventually launching Binance—whose exchange model and token-driven growth have shaped much of the industry’s trajectory. How big his fortune is depends on the methodology. Forbes’ real-time tracker had Zhao at $78.8 billion as of Feb. 10, 2026, while Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index put him at about $52.2 billion around the same time. At press time, Binance Coin (BNB) traded at $592.44. The takeaway, in Zhao’s words: “You will always feel late to BTC.” That sense of urgency is what pushed him from curiosity to conviction—and ultimately helped build one of crypto’s dominant platforms. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news