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Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao, pardoned by Donald Trump after a four-month prison sentence, now lives in a nine-bedroom Abu Dhabi villa and advises governments on crypto regulation. He is the richest man in crypto, worth an estimated $114 billion.
Changpeng Zhao, the richest man in crypto with an estimated fortune of $114 billion ($164 billion), lives in a nine-bedroom villa in Abu Dhabi with four bodyguards, a chef and a yacht.
Zhao's Binance Criminal Case
Yet he still likes to play the part of a normal dude, as he often describes himself. One morning in June, Zhao pulled up to the St. Regis resort in a Nissan SUV and offered a personal tour of the city. Zhao is not a normal dude. Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao was pardoned by US President Donald Trump last year after pleading guilty in 2023 to federal charges relating to violations of the American Bank Secrecy Act.
US authorities brought a criminal case against him for his management of Binance, which court papers depicted as a haven for Russian money launderers, Iranian sanctions evaders and Islamic State terrorists. Zhao pleaded guilty and escaped with his fortune intact. After serving a four-month prison sentence, Zhao returned to Abu Dhabi, still Binance's majority shareholder and still the most powerful figure in the industry.
These days, Zhao, 49, moves through the world like a head of state, flying around Asia on his private jet to advise governments on crypto regulation. His most influential allies are two powerful ruling families: the clan that runs the UAE, which wants his help creating a technology powerhouse in the desert, and the Trumps.
World Liberty Financial, the crypto start-up founded by US President Donald Trump and his three sons, generated $799 million for Trump last year, his single most lucrative asset. Trump pardoned Zhao last October, a move widely criticised as a quid pro quo.
Jurisdictional Arbitrage and Crypto Power
Known in the industry as CZ, Zhao often avoids reporters, but he met me several times this year, eager to put a friendlier gloss on his career at Binance, which still has not stanched the flow of dirty money. For years, his true calling has been what academics term jurisdictional arbitrage, moving from country to country in search of a legal framework pliable enough to accommodate his appetite for risk and growth.
In Abu Dhabi, he may have found an ideal base of operations. As we drove into the city, we passed a string of impressive compounds and drove towards the presidential palace, Qasr Al Watan, whose striking white dome resembles the Taj Mahal. Zhao was growing animated. Democracy has been hailed as, like, the holy grail for the last couple hundred years, but democracies are inefficient, he said.
If you get a benevolent dictator, it is actually extremely efficient. There is very little debate going on. You do not waste time on a lot of frivolous stuff. Lately, this top-down model of business and politics, simultaneously medieval and ultramodern, has gained traction in the United States.
On a trip to Abu Dhabi last year, Trump called the nation's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a very strong man and a man of vision like few others. Zach Witkoff, the son of one of Trump's top advisers, put it more bluntly at a crypto conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in May 2025. We really need to take a page out of His Highness' and the Emirates' book, Witkoff said.
Abu Dhabi's Allure for Billionaires
They are just an amazing example of how you can lead with innovation while also maintaining your family values. One day early this year, Zhao was working when the windows began to shake. He got up and walked onto his balcony, where he saw a trail of smoke in the sky. Zhao lives on Saadiyat Island, an enclave of Abu Dhabi across the Persian Gulf from Iran, which had just fired a missile at the UAE.
It was the start of a geopolitical crisis that has destabilised the region, but Zhao was not overly concerned. He returned to work. Billionaires gravitate to the UAE for billionaire reasons. The country does not levy an income tax, and it is considered extremely safe.
Until he settled in the UAE, Zhao was a man without a country. He was born in China, then moved to Canada with his family at the age of 12. After attending McGill University, he worked a series of technology jobs. In July 2013, over a poker game in Shanghai, a colleague suggested he check out this new thing called bitcoin.
After a few months of study, Zhao made a radical bet. He sold the family home, a three-bedroom apartment in Shanghai where he and his wife were raising two children, and ploughed the $900,000 in proceeds into bitcoin. Zhao went on to work at a succession of crypto start-ups in Asia. In July 2017, Zhao founded Binance.
Binance's Risky Trading Model
Within a few months, it was the largest exchange in the world, a title it has never relinquished. Binance's success rested on two pivotal insights. The first was that crypto investors were drunk on risk and would never be satisfied swapping dollars or yen merely for an equivalent amount of crypto. For years, Binance has operated as a margin exchange: traders can borrow money to place high-risk, high-reward bets on the prices of bitcoin and other popular tokens.
The second insight was simpler yet more consequential. Many crypto investors did not want to identify themselves, and Binance did not ask them to. For its first four years, the company allowed customers to open accounts without providing even the most basic KYC, the know your customer information that traditional companies require to prevent financial crime. It became an extremely lucrative free-for-all: a platform where unvetted investment products were available to unvetted traders.
As the market boomed, Binance took a cut of each transaction; the company quickly reached $1 billion in profits, according to Zhao's self-published memoir. Zhao was suddenly a crypto celebrity. But he has never been widely understood outside the industry. When he recounts his most contentious moments, Zhao portrays himself as a kind of passenger, a crypto nerd overwhelmed by success, a naive outsider.
It is not always a convincing performance. In June, Zhao told me that he had never really
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smh:This story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
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