T erry Gou is a self-made Taiwanese billionaire and the founder of Hon Hai Precision Industry, better known to the world as Foxconn, the largest contract electronics manufacturer globally. He founded the company in 1974 with a small loan from his mother, initially making plastic knobs for television sets. He built his company into a global manufacturing behemoth by becoming the indispensable assembly partner for the world's leading electronics brands, most famously Apple. Foxconn is the primary assembler of the iPhone and numerous other Apple products, and its massive factory complexes in China employ hundreds of thousands of workers.

Gou is renowned for his tough, military-style management philosophy and his relentless focus on supply chain efficiency, which has allowed his company to produce high-quality electronics at a massive scale and low cost. After building his manufacturing empire over four decades, he retired as chairman of Foxconn in 2019 to pursue a political career, launching an ultimately unsuccessful bid for the presidency of Taiwan. He remains the company's largest shareholder and a towering figure in the global technology industry.