Leo KoGuan is among the largest individual shareholders in Tesla, the world's most valuable carmaker. He's also a founder and chairman of SHI International, an enterprise software provider. The Somerset, New Jersey-based technology services company is closely held and had $16 billion of revenue in 2025.
The majority of KoGuan's fortune is derived from his stake in Tesla, the electric carmaker. KoGuan owned about 27.7 million shares of Tesla in May 2024, according to a person familiar with his finances.
He said in November 2024 that he'd started paring his stake and buying three-month T-bills instead, but hasn't provided additional details on the size and pace of his selling. He said in March 2026 that he'd also purchased 1 million shares of Nvidia Corp. and planned on buying more.
He also owns a 40% stake in SHI International, a closely held provider of technology products and services. SHI International had $16 billion of revenue in 2025, according to the company's website.
KoGuan was born in Indonesia, the son of Chinese parents. He later moved to the U.S. and received degrees in international affairs from Columbia University and law from New York Law School.
In 1989, he bought steeply discounted assets from a bankrupt software supplier called Lautek that was based in Somerset, New Jersey. The assets, which came from a Lautek division called Software House, became the basis for SHI International. KoGuan ran the company with his then-wife, Thai Lee, who was the first Korean-American woman to enter Harvard Business School. The two had married in 1989 and divorced in 2002.
By 2000, KoGuan had stepped away from the day-to-day operations of SHI, which at that point had annual revenue in excess of $1 billion. He remains the company's chairman and holds a 40% stake. Lee, who is chief executive officer, controls the remainder. She's said publicly that SHI never has sold shares to outsiders or taken on debt.
In the late aughts KoGuan was involved in real estate developments, including of luxury hotels in Shanghai. By then he'd also begun a years-long series of donations to a handful of Chinese universities including Peking University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Via his charitable foundation, he's written extensively about the need to preserve Chinese culture and warned that China wouldn't be best served by turning into a Western-style market economy.
In about 2018, KoGuan made investments is several stocks including Baidu and Nvidia before selling off most holdings and concentrating on his investment in Tesla, the electric vehicle maker. By 2021, he'd become among company's largest known individual shareholders.
He lives in Singapore.