John Tu

John Tu is a Taiwanese-American billionaire businessman and philanthropist. He is the co-founder of Kingston Technology.

Early life and education

John Tu was born in Chongqing, China in 1941. He was the son of an official in China's Nationalist government. He moved to Shanghai with his parents in 1945, before going to Taiwan two years later as the Chinese Civil War neared the coast.
Tu moved in 1960 to West Germany to study electrical engineering, and was educated at a language school in Munich. In Germany at that time, a two-year apprenticeship was required for everyone, so he worked at a shipbuilding factory. After working there for two years, he studied electrical engineering at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt in Germany and graduated in 1970. He then went to work for Motorola in Wiesbaden, Germany. In 1971 he moved to California.

Career

In 1982, he co-founded Camintonn with David Sun. In 1986, they sold it for $6 million. They then lost most their money in the 1987 stock market crash and founded Kingston Technology later that same year. In 1996, they sold 80 percent of the company to Softbank for $1.5 billion, before buying it back in 1999 for $450 million.

Philanthropy

In 2021 Tu made a donation to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation that enabled the Pulitzer Prize-winning Storm Lake Times to buy its local competition and a weekly in an adjoining county. He has supported Erin Gruwell's Freedom Writers and the Freedom Writers Foundation. In 2011, he donated $1.2 million to give every first year medical student at UC Irvine an iPad.

Personal life

He is married with two children.