He Bragged About a $53 Million Paper Profit on Stage — No One Clapped

The lecture hall in Renmin University's School of Philosophy—early June, the air conditioning not quite doing its job. When Zhang Xiaolong stepped onto the stage, his dark blue suit jacket was already draped over the back of the chair, his white shirt sleeves rolled to mid-forearm. The oversized smartwatch on his left wrist lit up occasionally, the screen showing a jagged line of red and green.

He was supposed to talk about "Civil Service Exams and Employment." Two slides into the opening, he suddenly clicked off the laser pointer and said, "I'm not doing this today. Let me tell you something real."

More than three hundred students sat in the audience. No one clapped. No one jeered. They just sat there.

He gave them a number: eighty million yuan in principal, one month, paper profit of fifty-three million.

He paused after saying it. According to students who were there, the silence lasted about five seconds. He was waiting, for shrieks, for applause, for even a single "wow." Someone coughed. Someone turned a page. In the third row by the window, a girl glanced at her phone, pressing the side button to check the time.

After five seconds, Zhang Xiaolong smiled. The smile didn't reach his eyes.

Then he started cursing. His words came faster, his pitch rising, the top button of his collar somehow undone. "You're just wasting your life taking the civil service exam." "Pathetic poor." "You'll never afford four decent dishes in your life." "You deserve to be unemployed." The words slammed out like a deck of cards thrown across a table, scattering everywhere.

Not a single student stood up to rebut him. Later, someone posted online: "We just thought what he said was so absurd that we didn't even want to respond. He wasn't disrespected at all—no one even interrupted him."

But it was precisely that "no one responded" that shattered him.

Zhang Xiaolong hadn't always been like this.

Ten years earlier, he was a star lecturer at Huatu Education, teaching verbal comprehension and expression—quick with jokes, faster with his delivery, uncanny at predicting exam questions. Students called him "Brother Long." Later he left to found Fenbi, touting "technology transforming education." Within three months of the app's launch, registered users topped a million. In an interview back then, he said something that would later be quoted again and again: "I don't chase quick money. I build things that give ordinary people low-barrier access to good education."

He was thirty-five when he said that, wearing a grey hoodie, his hair a little long, a canine tooth showing when he smiled.

On the day Fenbi went public, after the gong sounded at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, he raised a champagne flute on stage. In the photos, his tie was bright red. The stock price later peaked above thirty Hong Kong dollars, the market cap at twenty-three billion. Then came the long, slow decline, like a man walking into fog, his silhouette fading with each step.

By the first half of 2026, Fenbi had swung from profit to loss, with revenue projected to drop by no more than 18.3 percent year-over-year. At a board meeting, someone asked him for a plan. He gave four words: "Cut costs, find new revenue."

But in private, his phone screen was perpetually open to a trading app.

Back to that lecture hall.

After he'd finished with "you deserve to be unemployed," he added: "The money I made in one month of trading—you won't earn that in a lifetime." Then he raised his phone and turned the screen toward the audience. The motion was so quick that the front-row students later said they couldn't make out the numbers—only a field of red.

A male student later wrote on an anonymous forum: "At that moment I suddenly felt he wasn't showing off. He was crying for help. Like a man standing on a stage yelling 'Look at me,' but no one was looking."

In the last fifteen minutes of the lecture, Zhang tried to steer back to the civil service topic, but he'd lost the thread. His voice had gone noticeably hoarse. He drank two sips of water. The PowerPoint stayed on slide three, never advanced. When the lecture ended, he grabbed his jacket and left through the side door, skipping the usual post-talk photos with students.

A staff member caught up with him in the hallway and asked if he needed a car arranged. He waved his hand and said, "I'll walk."

That afternoon in Beijing was hazy. He walked along the road by Renmin University's east gate for about twenty minutes. No one knew where he went.

Two days later, Fenbi's official Weibo account posted a letter of apology—standard wording, proper punctuation. Zhang retweeted it without adding a single word of his own.

But the stock market offers no apology letters.

By mid-June, global tech stocks began to churn violently. Zhang's AI-related positions from early June—based on Fenbi's later disclosures, the principal was likely between six hundred million and 1.2 billion yuan—were nearly fully parked in relevant ETFs and US tech leaders. There was a brief rebound at the end of June. If he'd liquidated then, the loss could have been kept under eight million.

He didn't.

The first week of July, the market suddenly reversed, gapping down for three consecutive days. Fenbi's traders asked twice in the internal group chat: "Should we cut losses?" The first time, Zhang replied with a single character: "Wait." The second time, he didn't reply at all.

On July 7, they liquidated everything. The confirmed loss was approximately $8.3 million, or 56 million yuan.

The liquidation order was sent from Zhang's own terminal. At 2:17 that afternoon, sitting in Fenbi's Beijing headquarters, he executed the final sell. According to the cleaning lady on that floor, when she went in to tidy up that evening, his computer was still on, the screen frozen on the "historical orders" page of the trading software. His chair was turned at an angle toward the window.

On the windowsill sat a pot of pothos, its leaves drooping, untouched by water for days.

The next day, Fenbi announced: Zhang Xiaolong had resigned from all positions—executive director, board chairman, CEO.

The announcement used measured language, thanking him for "his contributions to the company over the years." The stock fell another 12 percent that day. The market cap, once twenty-three billion, had shrunk to below eight hundred million.

When he walked out of the headquarters, a few journalists with cameras were waiting by the gate. He wore a mask and carried a black briefcase with a scratch across its surface. A reporter asked, "Mr. Zhang, care to say a few words?" He didn't stop. He didn't shake his head. He just walked faster. After the black business van pulled away, its taillights glowed red in the dusk, turned a corner, and disappeared.

He has not appeared in public since.

As for that "paper profit" of fifty-three million, and the actual gains or losses in his personal account, no third party has ever verified them. Fenbi's disclosures only covered the company's losses. Zhang's personal trading records are not available through any public channel.

But there's one detail worth remembering.

Three days after the Renmin University lecture, a student posted on the school forum. The post didn't insult him. It said only this: "When he said he'd made fifty-three million trading stocks, no one in the audience clapped. He didn't curse us because no one clapped. He cursed us because he realized that even clapping wouldn't have helped."

Under that post, someone replied with a question mark. The original poster never elaborated.

Perhaps what truly broke Zhang Xiaolong in that lecture hall in early June was never the students' indifference. It was the faint recognition, already forming at the edge of his awareness, that the numbers in his account were borrowed, and that one day they would have to be returned. And when he couldn't pay them back, no one would even bother to say "Look at me" to him anymore.

On the day he resigned, July 8, his office was cleared out by administration. The pot of pothos was moved to the utility room at the end of the hallway. Someone watered it.

The leaves slowly straightened up again.