Investor Highlight: Tencent 💱

It’s not just the U.S. that has Government and Big Tech battling it out. Today, we’re looking at one investor/conglomerate -- Tencent -- that has ruffled feathers in Beijing amidst years of increasing crackdowns on China's Big Tech brothers, Alibaba and Meituan.

  

Tencent’s mission to use technology for good has earned the company an impressive place in society in the past 24 years. But the Chinese conglomerate with heavy holdings in social media and gaming has been under fire lately for the alleged shirking of compliance regulations in China, particularly for not doing enough to prohibit money laundering through the conglomerate's payments app, WeChat. Then there’s the big tech shakedown from Beijing regulators for anticompetitive practices (similar to the U.S.'s antitrust objections to Meta and Apple).

Meanwhile, the company has its hand in many of the world’s billion-dollar private companies, including games publisher, Epic Games. The Fortnite maker had its own legal dispute against Big Tech giant Apple, which Epic won earlier this year. Moreover, the edtech company BYJU and the social messaging app for the digitally native Discord have both hit decacorn status with Tencent heavily invested.