Hiroshi Mikitani is a Japanese businessman with an estimated net worth of $6.84 billion as of July 2017, according to Bloomberg. He is the fourth richest person in the list of Japan’s Top 50 Richest and 215th in the list of World Billionaires. Born on March 11, 1963 in Kobe, Hyogo, Japan, he attended Hitotsubashi University and graduated in 1988. He earned his MBA at Harvard University while working for the Industrial Bank of Japan and was transferred to the U.S. He also founded a consulting group called Crimson Group in 1997.

Mikitani has gained his estimated net worth of $6.1 billion as the chairman and CEO of Rakuten, a Japanese electronic commerce an Internet company that he founded in 1997. After two years, he changed the name of the company to Rakuten, Inc. He is also the head of the E-Commerce and Banking Business Units and the head of the Development Units. He continues to work on the acquisition of additional companies to help grow his global offerings as well as to challenge major online stores such as Amazon and eBay.

Hiroshi Mikitani has spent more than $1 billion over the past few years in obtaining Buy.com in the U.S. and Play.com in the U.K. to name a few. He also implemented a project called “Englishnization”, which will gradually make English the language of Rakuten despite having a majority of Japanese staff. He believes that English is not an advantage but it is a requirement. In May 2012, he bought a $100 million stake in the photo-sharing site Pinterest as well as Kobo, Canada’s e-book reader company, earlier that year. Lately, he has benefited from online deregulation when the bans on online drug sales and election campaigning was lifted. This means he can rake in more money in Japan. Among his major titles included the director of Kobo Inc., and the chairman of Rakuten Card Co., Ltd., Rakuten Travel Inc., Fusion Communications Corporation and Crimson Football Club, Inc.