Out Of Prison, Crypto’s Richest Billionaire Tells (Almost) All In A New Memoir |
Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the 49-year-old billionaire founder of Binance, has written a memoir. It arrives with the unmistakable timing of a man determined to tell the world his version of his meteoric crypto rise and fall, and foreshadow his comeback.
The book, Freedom of Money: A Memoir of Protecting Users, Resilience, and the Founding of Binance, runs 364 pages, self-published in English and Chinese, and is available on Amazon Kindle for $9.99, where it's already ranked #4 among all Kindle books.
The book traces Zhao’s path from rural China to Canada, then through jobs in Tokyo, New York and Shanghai, and finally to building Binance, the crypto exchange that grew with extraordinary speed into the largest in the world. Zhao also recounts Binance's long battle with U.S. regulators, the company's record $4.3 billion settlement for fostering unscrupulous money launderers, his four-month prison sentence in California, where he says he began writing the book, and his recent pardon by President Trump. He says the memoir is for readers who know him only from headlines, for those who have followed him for years, and for anyone curious how one founder could help shape an industry "and pay for it."
Like most memoirs, this one is an exercise in selection and emphasis.
The glowing and inspiring portrait Zhao assembles is of a man philosophically untouched by his success. Forbes estimates his fortune at roughly $110 billion, placing him ahead of Bill Gates. But wealth, he insists, was never the point. "I don't care about money," he writes. "I don't care about power. I don't care about fame. I don't even care about legacy." As evidence of his selflessness, Zhao cites charitable efforts such as Giggle Academy, his nonprofit education platform, and includes a foreword from Yi He, Binance’s cofounder and the mother of his three children. She says even after Binance became a global juggernaut, Zhao still wore clothes ordered from Amazon, biked to meetings and drove an old Toyota minivan.
Yet the book is equally intent on establishing Zhao firmly within the world’s power circles.
He writes of traveling the world and being received by political leaders and royalty, from Saudi Arabia's de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to the king of........