Himalaya Capital Management

Li Lu

Li Lu is the founder and chairman of Himalaya Capital Management, a value investing firm he started in 1997. Born in Tangshan, China, in 1966, Li was a student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests before fleeing to the United States. He arrived at Columbia University, where he earned three degrees at once—a BA, an MBA, and a JD—and heard Warren Buffett lecture, which set him on the path of value investing. After a year as a corporate finance associate at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, he left client work behind to run money his own way, founding Himalaya Capital in New York. Himalaya invests following the deep value tradition of Benjamin Graham, Buffett, and Li's close mentor Charlie Munger, whom he met in 2003. The firm runs a concentrated portfolio of businesses across Asia and North America, holds for the very long term, and takes substantial stakes in companies whose operations it studies closely. Munger was so taken with Li's approach that he entrusted his own family's wealth to Himalaya, the only outside manager he ever did so with, and gave Li the nickname "the Chinese Warren Buffett." The trade that defined Himalaya's reputation was BYD. Li spotted the Chinese battery and electric-vehicle maker before it was well known, put his own money behind it, and urged it on Munger, who passed the idea to Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. That recommendation helped turn a fledgling firm into one of the better-known value shops in the country, run out of a single office in Seattle.