TIME with ... Lei Jun
Tech magnate Lei Jun founded the ‘Apple of the East.’ He’s also a casualty of Trump’s trade war
FROM THE TIME HE WAS A SMALL BOY, LEI JUN strived to get close to technology. Computers obsessed his every waking hour. But in the rural China of the early 1980s, his teacher father’s monthly salary of $7 put a $2,000 Apple II far out of reach. So Lei devised elaborate ways to fiddle with anything high-tech.
He would wait for hours outside his school’s tiny computer lab, hoping to sneak in when a classmate missed his allotted turn. He took odd programing jobs—once working 72 hours straight without sleep—just to use a client’s PC. “I even drew a keyboard on a sheet of paper and spent classes secretly practicing typing, so I could use my time at the computer more efficiently,” Lei says.
