Lei Jun

Every night, Lei Jun (雷军) mustered the courage to build a car. Every morning, the sun rose and doubt returned. For a week in March 2021, one of China’s most successful technology founders cycled between conviction and terror — listing ten reasons to stake his legacy on electric vehicles during the day, ten reasons to walk away at night. Then he stepped on stage, voice hoarse from illness, and made a promise he could never take back.

Though millions stand against me, I shall go forth.

The failure that taught everything #

The story of Lei Jun’s automotive gamble begins not with cars but with software — and with the kind of failure that strips a young leader of every comfortable assumption. Jun joined Kingsoft, one of China’s earliest software companies, as its sixth employee in 1992, fresh from Wuhan University’s computer science program. He rose quickly, led product development, and poured himself into the Pangu Office Suite, a program Kingsoft believed would challenge Microsoft in the Chinese market. Pangu sold fewer than 10,000 copies. The failure was not incremental. It was total.

By 1998, Jun had assumed the CEO role at 28 — not in triumph but in crisis. Kingsoft was near bankruptcy, its flagship WPS word processor crushed by the arrival of Microsoft Office bundled with Windows. Microsoft had not built a better product. It had built a distribution monopoly. Jun secured a ¥33 million lifeline from Lenovo and pivoted Kingsoft toward a diversified software portfolio, but the lesson that settled into his bones was more fundamental than any strategic pivot: quality alone cannot defeat a system designed to exclude you. That understanding would resurface, with devastating clarity, two decades later.

Jun led Kingsoft to a Hong Kong IPO in 2007, then stepped back from daily management. What followed was six years of investing in more than twenty startups — including UCWeb, later sold to Alibaba, and YY, where a million-dollar bet grew to $129 million. He watched the mobile internet emerge as a platform he was not yet building for. The investor years sharpened his pattern recognition. They also deepened a restlessness that comfortable returns could not satisfy. When he co-founded Xiaomi in 2010, sharing millet congee with six partners at a modest Beijing gathering, he was 40 and already on his second act. No one, least of all Jun himself, imagined there would be a third.

Every morning, doubt returned #

Xiaomi’s smartphone triumph and subsequent collapse forged the operational muscle that would make the automotive bet conceivable. By 2014, Xiaomi was China’s top smartphone maker — 61 million units shipped, a $45 billion valuation, Lei Jun hailed as “China’s Steve Jobs.” Two years later, shipments had collapsed 36 percent. Market share fell from 15.9 to 8.9 percent. Xiaomi dropped out of the global top five. Analysts issued a verdict they considered final: no mobile phone company had ever made a successful comeback after a decline in sales.

Jun’s response was to do what no CEO of a company that size was expected to do. He personally took over supply chain management — not as a supervisory gesture but as a daily operational role. He opened Xiaomi’s first physical retail store, launched a plan for a thousand more, and stopped fixating on sales targets in favor of structural health. The turnaround was so dramatic — shipments surged 74.5 percent by the end of 2017 — that IMD Business School titled their case study “How Xiaomi Broke Every Law of Corporate Death.” But the private lesson was more important than the public vindication. Jun had learned that he could survive an existential crisis by throwing himself bodily into the machinery of a problem. He had also learned something darker: that the comfort of recovery was itself dangerous, because it made the next transformation feel unnecessary.

That next transformation arrived at 7:00 AM on January 15, 2021. Jun received a phone call: “Lei Zong, you’ve been sanctioned by America.” Xiaomi had been placed on the US Department of Defense blacklist in the final days of the Trump administration. Jun later called the moment 犹如晴天霹雳 — “like a bolt from the blue.” An emergency board meeting convened within hours. The discussion was rapid and technical until one board member asked the question that would redirect everything: “If you can’t make phones anymore, what happens to your 30,000 to 40,000 employees?”

Jun had no answer. The inability to answer — not the sanctions themselves, which were later reversed — sent him into a 75-day exploration of the automotive industry. His team visited ten cities, conducted 85 research sessions, and interviewed more than 200 industry insiders. NIO’s William Li and XPeng’s He Xiaopeng — direct future competitors — both urged him to enter the market. Jun later reflected with characteristic dry humor: “I’m still wondering — what’s in it for them having another competitor?”

On March 24, 2021, the board approved the automotive project. Then they attached a condition Jun had not anticipated: he must personally lead the division. The requirement triggered a week of anguish that Jun would later describe with unflinching honesty. “In every late night, I would barely muster the courage to decide to go all in,” he said in his 2024 annual speech. “But the next morning, when the sun rose, I was lost again. It was as if I was asking myself: starting a business is so painful — do I really want to start all over again from scratch? And with risks this enormous, what if I lose? Would my life just end in disgrace? And do I really have the physical stamina and energy to charge into an entirely new industry?”

Three fears. Each one rational. Each one sufficient, on its own, to justify walking away. Jun was worth billions. His company had survived near-death. He had earned every right to coast. The week between March 24 and March 30 was, by his own account, 特别煎熬 — “utterly agonizing.” Friends warned the auto industry was “too complex.” A key executive had just departed for TikTok, a blow Jun compared to being hit in the head. Everything was intertwined. He described it as 多事之秋 — “a troubled autumn” — where “all these things became a tangled mess in my heart.”

Then the mess resolved into seven characters. 虽千万人吾往矣 — “Though millions stand against me, I shall go forth.” The phrase is from Mencius, and in Chinese culture it carries the weight of absolute moral conviction. Jun invoked it when he called the board to confirm his decision. On March 30, visibly unwell, voice cracking, he stood before cameras and declared: “This is the last major entrepreneurial project of my life. I know full well what making this decision means. I am willing to stake all the accomplishments and reputation I have accumulated in my entire life, and fight for Xiaomi Auto.”

He rejected $10 billion in outside venture capital the same week. “We pay all the money ourselves, we bear all the risk ourselves,” he said. The reasoning was not financial caution. It was the opposite — a conviction that taking outside money for a decade-long project would make long-term alignment impossible. He wanted the freedom to make decisions no investor would tolerate.

The pawn that crossed the river #

In Chinese chess, a pawn that crosses the river can never retreat. It can only advance. Jun adopted the metaphor for what he became after March 30, 2021 — a technology executive who had irreversibly committed to learning an industry he did not understand.

The transformation was physical before it was strategic. Jun personally test-drove more than 170 cars and wrote over 200,000 characters of test-drive notes — the equivalent of a short novel on the sensory experience of automobiles. He obtained a racing license. He learned to drift. He required more than a hundred of his engineers to do the same, reasoning that people who build cars should understand what a car feels like at its limits. He attended winter testing in minus-30-degree conditions and summer testing in extreme heat. The tech CEO who once managed software teams from conference rooms was now sitting in prototypes, arguing about suspension tuning and aerodynamic drag coefficients.

The internal process was brutal. In late 2021, the first product review failed and the entire vehicle plan was scrapped. Jun cancelled all his other commitments and gathered core engineers for a meeting that lasted 21 consecutive days. “Sometimes one issue was argued from 9 AM to 9 PM,” he recalled. The SU7 Ultra performance variant was proposed, cancelled, then restarted over a span of months. Before the March 2024 launch, Jun invited 23 media contacts for honest assessments. Most said selling 3,000 units per month would be a miracle. He appeared “very haggard” in the weeks before launch, torn between fears of unsold inventory and fears of underproduction.

Then 50,000 orders arrived in 27 minutes. Jun watched the numbers climb from the same stage where he had declared this his last great bet three years earlier. “At that moment,” he said later, “all the grievances and misunderstandings of the past three years no longer mattered.” The validation was not merely commercial. It was personal — proof that a pawn who had crossed the river could still advance.

Seven characters in his heart #

The trajectory that followed — 600,000 deliveries in 22 months, quarterly profitability in 18 months, the Nürburgring production EV lap record — belongs to the brand’s story. What belongs to the founder’s story is what happened when the trajectory broke.

On March 29, 2025, a Xiaomi SU7 crashed into a concrete barrier on a highway in Anhui Province. All three occupants — university students — were killed. The car’s autopilot had been active. The battery caught fire. Jun publicly named it “the hardest time since founding Xiaomi in 2010.” He cancelled meetings, stopped posting on social media, and retreated from public life. Three students were dead because a product he had personally championed — a product born from his legacy bet, his sleepless nights, his seven characters of conviction — had failed to protect them.

The crisis was not a business problem. It was a moral reckoning. And it revealed something about Jun’s earlier decision to reject outside capital that no one had anticipated. When the fatal crash wiped $16 billion from Xiaomi’s market cap in a single week, Jun had no venture capital board demanding he minimize the recall, accelerate past the bad press, and protect quarterly numbers. He had the freedom — purchased at the cost of bearing all risk himself — to respond as accountability demanded. The 116,887-vehicle recall proceeded without the compromises that investor pressure routinely imposes.

When quarterly automotive profit arrived months later, during the safety crisis recovery, the two milestones coincided in a way that vindicated the structural choice Jun had made in that agonizing week of March 2021. Full self-funding was never about financial conservatism. It was about building the freedom to do the right thing when doing the right thing is expensive.

The last venture’s lesson #

Lei Jun’s story is not, at its core, about electric vehicles. It is about what happens when a founder who has already won asks himself whether winning was enough — and discovers that it was not.

The pattern is visible across three decades. Kingsoft’s near-bankruptcy taught him that quality without distribution is meaningless. The smartphone collapse taught him that personal accountability in a crisis is not delegation but immersion. The US sanctions scare taught him that a company built on a single product category is a company built on sand. Each failure deposited a specific competence. Each competence became essential for the next transformation. The man who took over supply chain management during a smartphone crisis was the same man who could credibly lead an automotive division — because he had already proven, at personal cost, that he was willing to learn an entirely new discipline from the ground up.

The most revealing detail in Jun’s story may be the smallest. When he finally committed to the automotive bet, he did not describe the decision in the language of business strategy or market opportunity. He reached for Mencius — a philosopher who wrote about moral courage twenty-three centuries ago. The seven characters he carried into that decision were not about cars or market share or competitive positioning. They were about the willingness to act on conviction when every rational calculation argues for retreat. That willingness — forged by failure, tested by doubt, and proven by the hardest moments a founder can face — is the irreducible thing that makes Lei Jun’s last venture more than a business story. It is a story about what a founder owes to the people who depend on him, and what it costs to pay that debt.

Last updated: March 15, 2026