Robin
Li

While speaking at a Baidu conference in July, Li was doused with water by an activist seemingly motivated by the Chinese tech company’s gear-up into artificial intelligence, machine learning and self-driving cars. But whether the man, who was jailed for five days, thought that Li is driving the company too fast or too slow is unclear. Baidu remains China’s dominant search engine — billionaire Li himself holds a search-engine patent — and has been expanding into maps, music, video and news. Since then, regulators have crimped operations and local competitors have encroached, and the company is no longer considered the equal of Alibaba and Tencent. Still, Li called it right when, in 2018, he dismissed the notion that Google might make a successful return to China.