This time at the U.S.-China dinner banquet, there was a detail that was quite interesting—sitting in the central position between Musk and Cook was not someone else, but the founder of Lens Technology, Zhou Qunfei. To be honest, you might not have paid much attention to this person before, but her experience is truly extraordinary.

She is a migrant worker who came out of the countryside, with no background at all, and she built herself up from scratch to become China's richest woman. Born in a small village in Hunan, her mother passed away when she was five, and her father was disabled due to a work injury and also blind. The family was so poor they had nothing, and at 16, unable to afford school fees, she had to drop out and go to Guangdong to work.
Initially, she was grinding glass on an assembly line in a factory, working during the day, and at night, when others rested, she would teach herself things like accounting certificates, computer operation certificates—learning whatever was practical—and passed exams one by one. After saving money for several years, she accumulated 20k yuan, and with her brother, sister, sister-in-law, and brother-in-law, a total of eight relatives, they opened a small workshop in Shenzhen to process watch glass. At that time, she did everything herself—repairing machines, running sales—holding on for four years.
The real turning point came after 2000, when the mobile phone industry began to explode. By chance, her small watch glass factory received an order from TCL for mobile phone screens. She immediately realized that the mobile phone glass market was about to take off, so she decisively established Lens Technology, focusing on research, development, production, and sales of mobile phone glass. Initially, she mainly supplied domestic and knockoff phones, but she was not satisfied and wanted to win Motorola’s order. Foreign companies’ quality standards were much higher, and she almost invested all her resources to meet Motorola’s requirements, finally producing the glass successfully for Motorola. In the end, Motorola V3 sold over 20k units worldwide, and Lens Technology rose to the forefront of the industry thanks to this victory. Later, orders from Nokia, Samsung, and other foreign companies naturally followed.
A bigger turning point came in 2007 when Steve Jobs released the first-generation iPhone, which suddenly became a full-glass touchscreen. At that time, Apple’s requirements for craftsmanship were ridiculously high, and they couldn’t find a suitable supplier worldwide. Zhou Qunfei saw the opportunity again, leading her team to work with Apple engineers for three months to overcome key manufacturing processes, finally achieving mass production of the glass panels for the first-generation iPhone. Since then, she became a long-term supplier for Apple, providing glass panels for later products like the iPad and MacBook—almost all of Apple’s products’ glass panels are made by Lens Technology. As a result, Lens also became the world’s largest company in the touch glass panel field.
This explains why she could sit next to Cook. But why is Musk sitting next to her as well?
Because after Lens Technology became the global leader in glass panels, they began expanding into a broader range of smart devices, including automotive cockpits and robots. In the automotive sector, they have cooperated with more than thirty car companies, including Tesla, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Li Auto, on car windows and central control screens. In the robotics sector, they mainly produce joints, sensors, and other components. These areas deeply overlap with Musk’s business, so naturally, they have many topics to discuss.
From a 15-year-old girl who dropped out of school with only a junior high school diploma from a rural village in Hunan, to building herself up to become China’s richest woman, and forty years later, sitting at a high-level U.S.-China dinner banquet with Cook on one side and Musk on the other—this is the story of Zhou Qunfei.