Li Lu

Li Lu was born in Tangshan, China; by his own account he was born in the 1960s, grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and came of age in China in the 1970s and 1980s. He recalls knowing almost nothing about business or investing at the time.⁠[1][2][3][4]

He attended Nanjing University, where he majored in semiconductor physics and economics.⁠[5]

In 1989, Li Lu was one of the student leaders of the Tiananmen Square protests. A student from Nanjing, he joined the movement relatively late and served as deputy to Chai Ling, commander-in-chief of the Protect Tiananmen Headquarters. According to Ian Buruma’s 1995 account, in May student leaders and intellectuals at one point decided to withdraw from the square on May 30; Li Lu objected to the decision and Chai Ling backed him. He said at the time that the government had been making deals with some students to retreat and that there were secret government agents about, so they had to stay. Li Lu himself held that the hunger strike that began on May 13 changed the whole picture, turning the student movement into a popular movement.⁠[1][6][6][6][6][6]

After the crackdown, he was No. 18 on the government’s most-wanted list of student leaders; he was forced to leave China and came to the United States as a refugee later that year. He recalled in 2012 that when he first arrived in America after escaping from Tiananmen Square, he had neither a place to stay nor a change of clothes, and for his first six months he slept in the common living room of a townhouse that a friend shared with a dozen others; he spoke no English, and his documents classified him as a “Stateless Alien.”⁠[7][8][3][9][9][9][9]

In 1990, he published the memoir Moving the Mountain: My Life in China from the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square, recounting his experiences from the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square. He was first invited to Columbia University to speak about his experiences as a pro-democracy protester at Tiananmen Square, later enrolled there, and studied at Columbia from 1990 to 1996.⁠[1][10][11]

He said in 2012 that Columbia College’s Core Curriculum let him understand the foundations of Western civilization for the first time and gave him a sense of belonging in America, and that the three reasons for his transformation were “Columbia, Columbia, Columbia.” He recalled arriving penniless, relying on scholarships, grants and huge student loans to get through school, and constantly worrying about how he would make a living.⁠[9][9][4][12]

In 1993, at a classmate’s suggestion, he attended a lecture by Warren Buffett at Columbia Business School and was introduced to value investing. He recalled in 2013 that he assumed the name “Buffett” meant there would be a buffet, but there was no free lunch; the lecture, however, was “like a punch in my eyes,” and he felt “like I had just woken up and a light had switched on.” He then spent nearly two years studying Buffett’s shareholder letters and material on Munger.⁠[1][12][12][12][4]

He bought the first stock of his life the same year, starting with cheap companies and gradually moving from seeking cheap companies to seeking quality yet cheap companies. He has said his personal net worth was still negative at the time, and that by the time he graduated in 1996 he had earned a considerable return from his stock investments.⁠[13][13][4][4]

The documentary Moving the Mountain, with Li Lu as its central figure, was directed by Michael Apted and produced by Trudie Styler, narrated by Li Lu himself, and combined archival footage with dramatized scenes shot in Taiwan. It premiered in New York in 1995 and was screened at the University of California, Los Angeles in May that year, when he was pursuing law and MBA degrees at Columbia University.⁠[6][6][7][6][7]

After the premiere, divisions among the former student leaders became public: Wu’er Kaixi criticized Chai Ling and Li Lu for their irresponsible radicalism, saying that by “sabotaging” an agreement to leave the square they shared responsibility for the bloodshed that followed; Ian Buruma, in his review, wrote that he found it hard to fault Chai Ling, Li Lu or others who refused to appease the government.⁠[6][6]

In 1996, he simultaneously earned a B.A. in economics from Columbia College, a J.D. from Columbia Law School and an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School, becoming the first student in Columbia University’s history to earn three degrees simultaneously.⁠[11][10][3]

After graduating, he worked at an investment bank in Los Angeles while continuing to invest in stocks on his own. He recalled that in his first year he took part in a large company’s initial public offering and received a large bonus, but he disliked investment banking and found that his salary and bonus were no greater than his spare-time stock returns; after one year he quit to become a professional investor. It was while working at this bank that he first met Charlie Munger at a mutual friend’s house.⁠[4][4][4][4]

In late 1997, he founded Himalaya Capital, and since January 1, 1998 he has run the firm’s principal fund, Himalaya Capital Investors, LP. He recalled that he had very few supporters at the start and pooled a small sum with the help of a few close friends, acting as chairman, fund manager, secretary and analyst with only a cell phone and a laptop.⁠[8][11][4][4]

The fund’s launch coincided with the Asian financial crisis; he bought shares in a number of excellent Asian companies and in U.S. and Canadian oil companies, suffered a 19% paper loss that year, and one of his largest investors withdrew the following year. He said that in the second half of 1998 he withstood the pressure and made a few important investments that brought his investors exceptional returns over the next two years.⁠[4][4][4][4]

To retain and attract investors, for several years he used an equity long-short strategy to manage the fund’s volatility. He said the fund suffered no loss in the 2001–2002 crisis after the internet bubble and its assets under management grew significantly, but constant trading left him unable to concentrate on long-term opportunities; he regards his failure to invest heavily in his best ideas during this time as the biggest mistake of his career.⁠[4][4][4][4]

In a 2013 interview he called shorting “one of the worst mistakes I’ve made,” saying Himalaya had stopped shorting about nine years earlier, citing the capped upside and unlimited downside of short positions, the fact that the best shorts often involve fraud that can go undetected for a long time, and the way shorting distracts from long-term investing.⁠[12][12][12]

On the weekend after Thanksgiving in 2003, following an introduction by their mutual friend Ron Olson, he had a conversation of several hours with Munger in the library of Munger’s Santa Barbara home, walking him through every company he had invested in, researched or was interested in. Munger told him that the problems he faced were practically all the problems of Wall Street’s way of thinking, and that if he was willing to give up that path and take one different from Wall Street, Munger was willing to invest with him.⁠[14][4][4][4]

He recalled that when he first discussed BYD with Munger that year, Munger had never met BYD chairman Wang Chuanfu, had never visited the factory and was relatively unfamiliar with the Chinese market and culture, yet the questions Munger raised then remain the most pertinent questions about investing in BYD.⁠[4][4]

In 2004, Munger became his investment partner. With Munger’s help, he completely reorganized the firm along the lines of Buffett’s and Munger’s early investment partnerships: investors who stayed signed long-term lock-up agreements, the fund stopped accepting new investors, and the new fund retained part of the original portfolio, including the investment in BYD. By his own report, the new fund returned 36% a year compounded net of all expenses from the fourth quarter of 2004 to the end of 2009, and more than 29% a year compounded since its inception in January 1998.⁠[4][4][4][4]

In 2013 he described Munger as his “mentor, teacher, partner, and friend,” adding that he was also friendly with Buffett but not nearly as close, because Buffett lives in Omaha.⁠[12]

In September 2008, Berkshire Hathaway’s MidAmerican Energy Holdings announced it would pay $230 million for a 10% stake in BYD (225 million shares); Buffett later called BYD “an amazing Chinese company” in his 2008 shareholder letter. Li Lu said in 2013 that Munger was equally impressed by the company, which led to the investment; in 2024 he said that if they had not introduced a reputable investor like Berkshire in 2008, BYD’s success would have faced more challenges.⁠[15][15][16][12][13]

Speaking about BYD in 2013, he said its founder was a terrific engineer who started the business with a $300,000 loan and no additional money until the IPO, building a company with $8 billion in revenue and 170,000 employees, and that “this company is a learning machine.”⁠[12][12][12]

In May 2010, he helped translate and publish in China the Chinese edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Peter Kaufman’s anthology of Munger’s thinking, and wrote its foreword; all proceeds from the book were donated to general education and value-investing education. In the foreword he wrote that Munger turned 85 in 2009 and a friend helped him realize that translating the book would be the best way to thank his mentor. By his account in 2023, the Chinese edition sold more than 1.2 million copies over the following ten years.⁠[17][11][4][14]

He received Columbia College’s 2012 John Jay Award for professional achievement and spoke at the award dinner on March 7, 2012. In the speech he said that America and China both define themselves as civilization states rather than nation states defined by geography, and that after the Core Curriculum he realized “I am as American as many other Americans, except everybody else came a little bit earlier than I did.”⁠[10][9][9][9]

In spring 2013, Graham & Doddsville, the Columbia Business School student newsletter, published his interview under the title “Know What You Don’t Know.” He said that in Himalaya’s 16 years it had been through the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the 2000 dot-com bust and the 2008 financial crisis, and that a crisis tests intellectual honesty: to “know what you know, know what you don’t know, know what you don’t have to know, and realize that there is always a possibility that ‘you don’t know that you don’t know.’”⁠[12][12][12][12]

In the same interview he said he was the first investor in the financial data company Capital IQIQIQ is a blockchain project that grew out of the online encyclopedia Everipedia. It runs IQ.wiki, an encyclopedia of blockchain and crypto assets, and launched the IQ token in Seoul in 2018; in 2025, IQ and Frax launched KRWQ, a stablecoin pegged to the South Korean won.Open the full entry and sold it too early, but that he liked win-win situations in which wealth is created together with entrepreneurs; he also said he lets his personal interests define his circle of competence and knows China, Asia and America well.⁠[12][12][12][12]

In July 2014, in Pasadena, California, he completed the Chinese essay series A Discussion of Modernization, later released in English translation. It places the question of China’s modernization within the tens of thousands of years of human civilization, proposes a division into Civilization 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, and seeks to answer why a vast disparity arose between China and the West in the modern era and how China could overcome it; he wrote that his interest in China’s modernization had lasted more than thirty years.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

Himalaya Capital sponsored the value investing course created jointly with Professor Jiang Guohua at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, the first value investing course in China. In the course’s opening lecture on October 23, 2015, he set out the fiduciary duty of investment professionals: every penny entrusted by a client should be treated as the life savings their parents worked hard to earn, and he held that fiduciary duty is innate, so those without it should not join the profession.⁠[18][18][11][18][18]

In the lecture he argued that China was at an interim stage between Civilization 2.0 and Civilization 3.0, which he called Civilization 2.5, and that because the cost of deviating from the main track of the modern market economy is very high, China would very probably continue in the direction of Civilization 3.0.⁠[18][18]

In September 2017, he and Alexander Navab of KKR were elected to Columbia University’s board of trustees; he served until 2024.⁠[10][19]

In July 2018, the California Institute of Technology announced his election as a trustee. In a Q&A at the time he said the lessons of his career were, first, to define one’s circle of competence with intellectual honesty, and second, to have the highest degree of fiduciary duty, imagining that every dollar taken from a client comes from one’s own middle-class parents entrusting their life savings.⁠[1][1][1]

On December 13, 2018, he published the second part of his Discussions About Modernization series, arguing that as Sino-U.S. tensions escalated into a trade war after President Trump took office, the relationship had to be understood from the long history of the evolution of human civilization, and discussing China’s options and the pitfalls it must avoid.⁠[20][20][20][20]

He is a co-founder and board member of The Asian American Foundation (TAAF) and served as its inaugural board chair from 2020 to 2024; the foundation aims to serve the 23 million Asian American and Pacific Islander community and help it live free from discrimination and violence.⁠[19][19]

After the COVID-19 outbreak, he launched relief efforts through the Li Lu Humanitarian Foundation together with Himalaya Capital employees, friends and volunteers; from late January to early March 2020 they donated more than 10 million RMB (about $1.5 million) in funds and medical supplies to over 100 hospitals and medical institutions in Wuhan and elsewhere in China, including direct donations of RMB 4 million to 16 hospitals and institutions. In January 2020 he co-founded the Guardians of the Angeles Charitable Foundation to support frontline medical workers and their families, and serves as its board chairman.⁠[21][22][21][11]

On March 13, 2020, he hosted a video conference in which three Chinese experts, Peng Zhiyong, director of the ICU at Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Cao Bin, and Zhang Wenhong, head of infectious diseases at Huashan Hospital of Fudan University, shared their experience with U.S. scientists, medical practitioners and policymakers. In April, as the pandemic spread in the United States, he donated $1.5 million to the Guardians of the Angeles Charitable Foundation, which shifted to procuring masks and other protective equipment for U.S. frontline healthcare workers and first responders.⁠[23][23][23][23][22][22]

In April 2020, his Chinese-language book Civilization, Modernization, Value Investing, and China was published in China. In May the same year, he released a recommended reading list, organized by themes such as science, philosophy, evolution and the history of human civilization.⁠[11][17][24]

In April 2020, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in the Class V “Business, Corporate, and Philanthropic Leadership” section.⁠[11][11]

Munger died in November 2023. In a tribute published on November 30, he wrote that he received a call from the Munger family while on a business trip in Asia, took the next flight to California, and learned on landing that Munger had died a few hours earlier; he called Munger his “mentor, partner, dear friend and above all, life-long role model,” in an investment partnership that had lasted two decades. He wrote that China’s educated class increasingly regards Munger as the embodiment of modern-day Confucianism, a vision he considers crucial to China’s modernization and its interaction with the world.⁠[14][14][14][14][14]

On December 7, 2024, he spoke on “Global Value Investing in Our Era” at the tenth-anniversary celebration of the value investing course at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, appearing in person in Seattle while participants in Beijing joined online. He said Himalaya had held BYD for 22 years, during which its stock fell more than 50% at least six times and once by more than 80%, while BYD’s sales grew from one billion yuan to nearly one trillion yuan; he described such price drops as tests of the boundaries of one’s circle of competence.⁠[13][13][13][13][13]

He also recounted that Munger read Barron’s for fifty years and found only one investment idea, earned nearly a tenfold return on it, and then reinvested the proceeds in Himalaya’s fund, earning another tenfold-plus return.⁠[13][13]

In October 2025, Columbia Law School announced his $15 million lead gift for the renovation of its law library, to be named the Li Lu Law Library; it is the largest single gift by an individual in the school’s history. The new library occupies 50,000 square feet over three floors of Jerome L. Greene Hall, with more than 600 study seats. He said, “a library is never just a building or collection. Rather, it is the intellectual heart of a university.”⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

On October 5, 2026, at the 36th Annual Graham & Dodd Luncheon at the Metropolitan Club in New York, he held a fireside chat with Tano Santos, academic director of the Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing at Columbia Business School; the school later published an English transcript and posted video of the event on its YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel. In the conversation he summarized value investing in six principles: three from Benjamin Graham (a stock is a piece of ownership of a business, the market is there to serve you rather than instruct you, and one should require a margin of safety), the circle of competence from Buffett, “fish where the fish are” from Munger, and a sixth of his own: that wealth, in the end, is one’s percentage ownership of global purchasing power.⁠[25][25][26][25][25]

On generative AI, he said the technology is “enormously helpful, transformative, and extraordinarily dangerous,” and that society must draw a red line ensuring that its self-learning and use always keep a human in the loop, keeping it on the tool side rather than the creature side. He cited a recent prospectus in which a company calling itself a research lab both stated that its technology had a 10 percent chance of killing everyone and invited investors to put in at least $100 billion at a $2 trillion valuation, which he said illustrated how irrational the market had become.⁠[25][25][25][25][25]

On China’s economy, he said that ten years ago China launched the ten-year Made in China 2025 plan to escape the middle-income trap, and later, under the trade war and technology restrictions, doubled down on technological self-sufficiency; these goals came with heavy costs, one of the principal costs over the past five years being the balance sheets and wealth of middle-class families, with nationwide real estate prices down about 40 percent on average. He said China sets a new set of objectives roughly every ten years, with heavy costs attached, and sometimes in the next ten years the objective becomes the cost: early industrialization made the environment a cost before environmental protection became an objective, and real estate developers, once the objective during urbanization, later became the cost. As an investor or entrepreneur, he said, “you always want to know whether you are the objective or the cost,” adding that “being the cost of a state objective is no fun.” In the Q&A, an audience member asked whether the Chinese stock market was the objective or the cost; he answered that as real estate’s share of household and national balance sheets declines, the stock market must eventually carry the nation’s wealth, because it is the only asset that grows with the economy and also drives its growth.⁠[25][25][25][25][25][25][25][25][25]

In the same Q&A he said he does not “think anything of” cryptocurrency, calling it “fundamentally bogus,” predicting it would eventually disappear on its own, and saying society would be better off banning it. He closed by quoting his “mentor, partner, and teacher” Charlie Munger that the highest order of relationship is “a seamless web of deserved trust,” and recommended that those starting their careers lean toward that win-win way of life.⁠[25][25][25][25]

In text written for Poor Charlie’s Almanack, he borrowed the batting analogy of Ted Williams: an investor swings hard only when a “fat pitch” lands in the sweet spot, and most of the time “you don’t have to do a thing other than be amused”; he argued that a common problem among investors is swinging too often, while an equally harmful one is finding a fat pitch but being unable to swing with the full weight of one’s capital.⁠[19][19][19][19]

He holds that the biggest risk in investing in the stock market is not price volatility but permanent loss of capital, and that a falling share price is not only not a risk but may be an opportunity. He said in 2026 that all intelligent investment is value investment, because investors always want to get a little more than they pay for, and that the basic principle is discounted future cash flow.⁠[4][25][25]

His books include the English-language memoir Moving the Mountain: My Life in China (1990) and the Chinese-language Civilization, Modernization, Value Investing, and China (2020); the Himalaya Capital website also hosts English versions of his essays, interviews and speeches, including the Discussions About Modernization series, his Peking University lectures, his John Jay Award speech and his tribute to Munger.⁠[8][17]

He was named a Henry Crown Fellow by the Aspen Institute in 1998, a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in 2001, and received the Aspen Institute’s Henry Crown Leadership Award in 2023; he has also received the Raoul Wallenberg Human Rights Award from the Congressional Human Rights Foundation and the Reebok Human Rights Award. His life story is featured in the Family of Voices section of the Many Voices, One Nation exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.⁠[5][19][1][8]

He is a member of the Committee of 100 and the Council on Foreign Relations.⁠[8]

Himalaya Capital: Official website: https://www.himcap.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]