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Meituan founder Wang Xing locks down social media posts as China’s food delivery giant puts antitrust investigation behind it
- The Meituan founder and chief executive has hidden from public view all of his posts on Chinese microblogging platforms Weibo and Fanfou
- That move was apparently made weeks before the government closed its antitrust investigation of Meituan, which was handed a US$533 million fine
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Wang Xing, the 42-year-old billionaire founder and chief executive of Meituan, has apparently locked down nearly 18,000 of his social media posts from public view, weeks before the food delivery and on-demand local services giant was slapped with a 3.44 billion yuan (US$533 million) fine by the government to end the firm’s antitrust investigation.
Online checks made by the South China Morning Post found that Wang has hidden from the public all of his 661 posts on popular Chinese microblogging service Weibo and 17,105 posts on Fanfou, a now-obscure microblogging platform that he launched in 2007 during his early days as an entrepreneur.
Fanfou has served as Wang’s de facto online fan club, where he has posted about three times a day on average for 14 years. His bio on the platform reads: “If I haven’t seen, thought of, or done anything worth mentioning on Fanfou today, then this day was wasted.”
Wang, whose net worth was estimated by Forbes to be US$21.6 billion as of Monday, had stopped posting on Fanfou in May after he published a millennium-old Chinese poem seen as an unsubtle jab at the government. It sparked a social media frenzy and a sell-off of Meituan stock that wiped out US$16 billion of its market value. That post has since been taken off the Fanfou platform.
A Meituan representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Hong Kong-listed company’s share price closed up 8.36 per cent to HK$277.40 on Monday.
Wang’s move to have a lower profile on Chinese social media reflects how the country’s tech moguls remain wary of Beijing’s crackdown on major internet platform operators.
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