In the face of public opinion: the former richest man "war" flow

With a fortune of 340 billion yuan, Zhong ranked second in the 2024 Hurun Rich List, giving up the title of "China's richest man" for three years.

Referring to ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming and Pinduoduo founder Huang Zheng, Nongfu Spring founder Zhong delivered a "battle letter" to newly richest man Zhang Yiming: "I hope Mr. Zhang Yiming, Tiktok, Toutiao and all other media that have personally hurt me by rumors, I am waiting for your sincere apology!" I'm waiting."

Addressing Zhang, Zhong said: "As the actual controller of Toutiao, it is also a for-profit company, a platform company with enough power to control public opinion. Because of this background, please bear the principles and rules of a corporate civilization."

Zhong also made specific mention of the platform's algorithm, saying that some people use algorithms to block messages from many angles, and some platform companies rely on confrontation to create negative characters to obtain traffic. He called for algorithms to be made clear to the public. He also referred to the whole Internet civilization. He believes that the Internet civilization and agricultural civilization, industrial civilization is the same existence. Any kind of civilization has gone through a long period of human values, conflicts of interests, and multi-party contests, and has slowly come to the interval of serving humanity. However, when a certain civilized force goes too far, it is harmful to mankind.

Discussing Pinduoduo, he pointed out: "The price system that the Internet platform has brought down, especially the price system like Pinduoduo, is a great harm to Chinese brands and Chinese industry."

As a prominent representative of the older generation of traditional entrepreneurs, Zhong's outspokenness deserves our attention, but its correctness needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis, not a generalization.

Given the frequency of livestreaming problems and the rush of entrepreneurs into the field, Zhong has reason to be dismissive. As the richest man for many years, Zhong's enterprises have a solid foundation, extensive product distribution network and high brand recognition. Therefore, Zhong can avoid relying on emerging sales models such as live streaming of goods, and the enterprises can still rely on their existing advantages to develop steadily.

Entrepreneurs bringing goods in person is a phenomenon, and many entrepreneurs often get caught up in the chase for traffic when they talk about growth. As they become more and more addicted to it, they have no time and energy to build the real core competitiveness of the enterprise. As he said, entrepreneurs should not see profit as the only pursuit, but should pursue something beyond it, which is why Zhong called these companies "plain businesses".