David Sun – Billionaire

An immigrant from Taiwan, David Sun met his longtime business partner, John Tu, in a basketball league in the U.S. in 1978. A few years later, the two launched their first computer memory business out of a garage and sold it to PC manufacturer AST (now defunct) a few years later. But after pouring all their earnings into the stock market, the pair lost nearly everything on October 19, 1987, one of the worst days in Wall Street’s history. Less than three months later, and again out of a garage, they started anew in the untapped market of surface-mount memory chips, eventually propelling Kingston Technology to become an industry leader in storage and memory products. Today the privately held company, which the longtime partners still run, employs more than 3,000 people worldwide. Sun and his wife, Diana, have a foundation that provides grants to education and health-based programs, primarily in Taiwan.