Chapter 1774 2004

The end of 2004.

Su Yehao had just signed a contract with a mainland organization to purchase a Dawning 4000A supercomputer with a peak computing speed of 11 trillion calculations per second.

Before he even left Si Jiucheng, he heard the news of the super tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

He immediately called Nangong Tian to ask about the situation on the Maldives resort island. It happened to be the Christmas holiday, and there should be quite a few tourists.

Then he contacted Master Jiang and asked if Jiang Yu's father needed help contacting a chartered flight to pick up tourists traveling to Thailand, Malaysia, and other places.

After a brief understanding of the situation, he learned that all of his islands in the Maldives had been affected.

Some of the water houses were washed away, and the buildings on the shore of one island collapsed. In addition to two tourists who died while snorkeling, one employee was missing and his whereabouts were temporarily unknown.

Under the Hong Kong Hao Tourism Group, two of the five tourist groups traveling in Phuket, Thailand, also suffered casualties.

Su Yehao vaguely remembered this incident, but he didn't remember the specific date. Natural disasters were unavoidable, and all he could do was clean up the aftermath.

That day, he publicly announced a donation of 300 million Hong Kong dollars, and privately asked Master Jiang to take the initiative to contact the families of the dead and injured tourists, coordinate with insurance companies, and do a good job in comforting them as soon as possible.

Su Yehao obviously couldn't do anything about the super earthquake in the ocean.

Nangong Tian was terrified of this, because if she hadn't been at home taking care of the baby, and Jiang Yu's belly hadn't been getting bigger, making it inconvenient for her to live on the island, their family might have gone to the Maldives for vacation during Christmas this year.

In addition, there was the voyage in October, which happened to pass near the Indonesian waters.

Su Yehao wasn't too worried about this. The disaster mainly affected the coast, and the waves in the deep sea weren't very big, so it was difficult to affect his super yacht…

The beginning of 2005.

Tian Yu Entertainment held a charity performance, promising that all proceeds would be donated. A survey report appeared in mid-January, stating that the total number of dead and missing might exceed 200,000.

As the days passed, by early February, not many media outlets were talking about the disaster. Su Yehao also took time to attend Beyond's farewell concert.

After attending the concert that day, he went to Si Jiucheng the next day to participate in a discussion on the development of the western region, and delivered a speech on vigorously building photovoltaic power generation equipment, covering 1% of the desert, to meet the country's electricity demand.

As soon as the news came out, the photovoltaic sector's stock price soared, and a total of more than 20 listed companies directly hit the daily limit. The news quickly spread abroad, making many environmentalists feel like they had been injected with chicken blood, and regarded Su Yehao as the savior of the Earth's ecological environment.

There was, of course, a reason for daring to give such a speech.

At the beginning of 2005, Su Yehao invested money to acquire several overseas photovoltaic companies, and had basically opened up the upstream and downstream of the industry, waiting only for future idle funds to be in place before going to the sunny desert areas of Northwest China to generate electricity and raise sheep.

As soon as the big news about photovoltaics subsided, Yanwenzi Group made another move, acquiring Blizzard Games for $5.5 billion and announcing that it would merge with Su Yehao's Valve Game Company.

Earlier, Su Yehao didn't have the strength to swallow up Blizzard Games, which was worth two to three billion US dollars. Now that Blizzard Games had launched the popular new game "World of Warcraft," he might not be able to afford it if he didn't take action.

This merger was suggested by other members of the Yanwenzi Group's board of directors, mainly to monetize traffic and further seize the global game market share.

In fact, it didn't matter whether or not Blizzard was acquired.

As a major shareholder, Su Yehao did not intervene this time. The main reason was that Yanwenzi Group, with a market value of nearly 40 billion US dollars, already had the strength to independently raise funds and did not need him to provide additional financial support.

Google also chose to take action.

Google successively acquired three companies in four months.

Recently, following Su Yehao's advice, it tried to contact the listed company Marvel, planning to acquire Marvel at a premium of approximately $1.2 billion and directly privatize it for delisting.

Making money was secondary. The main reason was that Su Yehao wanted to increase Google's influence and make it cooler in the eyes of young people, and incidentally help Jiang Yu and Nangong Tian's Tian Yu Entertainment.

And so it went.

Big and small things kept happening, and in the blink of an eye, it was June 2005.

Jiang Yu had successfully given birth to a little girl. Due to the umbilical cord around her neck, she chose a cesarean section and recuperated for a long time after the operation.

Before giving birth, she was still worried about whether she would have a scar after having a daughter, but Jiang Yu immediately put such trivial matters out of her mind.

Su's father once again made a big splash, announcing in a media interview that he would give Jiang Yu one-thousandth of the mainland's high-speed rail shares.

People didn't think much of it at first, feeling that Su's father was stingy, and news about daughters not being as popular as sons was flying all over the gossip tabloids, causing a lot of discussion.

In the end, Su Yehao took the initiative to stand up and clarify.

Faced with the reporters' siege, he said that his family was discussing with the north to jointly build the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail, which was about 1,300 kilometers long, with an estimated total cost of more than 200 billion yuan, and that one-thousandth of the shares was worth about 200 million yuan.

As soon as the news came out, the onlookers were immediately envious.

Some netizens left messages saying that because they had given birth to a daughter, they only ate chicken soup once during their confinement period, and it was only half an old hen. Other netizens left messages saying that they were scolded for being prodigal when they dug a few more scoops of milk powder when preparing formula.

Su Yehao couldn't help but sigh when he saw this.

The concept of favoring sons over daughters was still quite strong these days. When housing prices rise, parents may cry and regret it, and feel that having a daughter is very good.

Therefore, defeating traditional concepts may not only depend on the change of social atmosphere, but also on high housing prices.

The discussion on the construction of high-speed rail had just begun. If Su Yehao hadn't been willing to invest one-third of the funds, the plan might have been delayed again.

Now that the problem of start-up funds had been solved, many foreign high-speed rail companies were excited and hoped to get news from Su Yehao through various channels.

Su Yehao knew that the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail was a cash cow.

He also knew that land acquisition costs, labor costs, and building material prices were increasing year by year, so he thought the sooner construction started, the better. The key was which company was economical and willing to transfer technology.

He planned to use the equity of various Internet companies as collateral to borrow low-interest loans from banks to build high-speed rail. He had considered this project two years ago, but he didn't expect that he would be able to easily come up with such a large sum of money so quickly.

On the surface, he said that he would pay one-third of the funds, but in fact, he would first take some start-up funds, and the rest could be mortgaged with the equity of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail itself. With sufficient strength, investing in this project was like getting something for nothing.

Even if others knew that he was getting something for nothing, they couldn't get banks to rush to lend him money like Su Yehao.

The world's richest man was not just blowing his own horn.

In just a few short years, the Su family's foundation had become very impressive…