Co-Founder, COO
Kingston Technology Co.
Co-Founder, President
Kingston Technology Co.
THE NUMBERS: Sold 80% of Kingston to Japan-based SoftBank Corp. for $1.5 billion in 1996 and generously shared proceeds with employees. The founders bought the company back in 1999 for $450 million. Kingston’s estimated annual sales now approaching $13 billion.
FAST AND FURIOUS: This year sold off its popular HyperX business unit to Palo Alto’s HP for $225 million. Still retained the ability to make memory products used by gamers, such as flash memory, dynamic random access memory and solid state drive gaming products under the Kingston name. As such, it has kicked off a newly rebranded line, dubbed “Fury,” for the new slate of offerings.
BIG BREAK: Sun, Tu co-founded memory products maker Camintonn in the 1980s and sold it to former Irvine computer maker AST Research Inc. They left AST to start Kingston after losing millions in Camintonn proceeds in the 1987 stock market crash. Now have built second fortune.
SECRET BUSINESS: Prior estimates of the duo’s wealth factored in annual sales that were long estimated in the $7 billion to $8 billion range. In 2020, that figure increased to $13 billion, due to the company’s “services division,” which includes the memory that Kingston makes on behalf of PC manufacturers. That business hasn’t been accounted for before publicly.
EMERGING BUSINESS: Tu has provided more than $50 million in funding for upstart medical diagnostic company Fluxergy, an Irvine-based firm working to build a better, faster test for COVID-19 (see story, page 8).
EDUCATIONAL EFFORTS: Sun and his wife, Diana, last year pledged $1.75 million in annual contributions to expand the Simon Scholars Programs, a six-year scholarship program sponsoring underserved, mostly first-generation students from the end of their sophomore year of high school through college graduation.
HISTORY: Tu, originally from China, moved to the U.S. in 1972. He once worked as a cook in his uncle’s Chinese restaurant and as an apprentice welder while living in Germany as a young man. Sun, who was born in Taiwan, came to the U.S. in 1977.
Sun says he and John Tu were taking a trip together to Taipei, Taiwan in August 1987 when Tu insisted on consulting a fortuneteller, who told him he would find a business partner and start a company. About an hour or so later, Sun reluctantly went inside and heard the same message that included the future gazer’s prediction the business would be “very big.”
Shortly afterward the two men founded Kingston.
“That’s a true story. It’s fate, it’s luck,” Sun told the Business Journal late last year. “The fortuneteller doesn’t know he and I are together. The only reason John wanted me to go in is to verify that I would be the partner.”
Quipped Tu: “I paid the fortuneteller, actually.”
• NET WORTH: $6.2 billion
• LAST YEAR: $5.8 billion
• AGE: Sun 69, Tu 79
• RESIDENCE: Irvine, Rolling Hills
• SOURCE OF WEALTH: computer storage, memory products
