Anthony Tan

Anthony Tan (born 1982) is a Singaporean businessman, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Grab, a publicly traded technology company and the first unicorn in Southeast Asia; in 2021 Forbes listed him as one of Singapore's richest people with an estimated net worth of $790 million ^{1 2}.

Tan was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1982 ^{1 3}. His father, Tan Heng Chew, is an automobile manufacturing executive who served as president of Tan Chong Motor, the Malaysian company that assembles and distributes Nissan vehicles in Southeast Asia; his great-grandfather was a taxi driver and his grandfather introduced the Japanese automotive industry in Malaysia ^{1 4}. He worked on the assembly line at his father's company and attended meetings with union bosses at a young age, started his first business venture at 11 retail trading X-Men comics, and at 14 volunteered to raise money for the AIDS Foundation ^{1 2}. He attended the University of Chicago, earning a bachelor's degree in economics and public policy, and later an MBA from Harvard Business School ¹. He is married to Chloe Tong, daughter of Tong Kooi Ong, and they have five children; concurrent with the company's move to Singapore, he took up Singapore citizenship in 2016 ¹.

Tan was head of supply chain and marketing at the Tan Chong Group but chose not to work for the family business, developing his company idea after a Harvard friend visited Malaysia and complained about its taxi system ¹. While attending Harvard Business School he partnered with his classmate Tan Hooi Ling — no relation, despite the shared surname — on making taxis safer in their home country; their business plan for a taxi booking app won second prize at the HBS New Venture Competition in 2011, and with the $25,000 prize money, their own funds and an investment from Tan's mother they launched MyTeksi in June 2012, headquartered in Kuala Lumpur ^{1 5}. By 2016 the company, backed by Singapore's state investment firm Temasek Holdings, had relocated to Singapore and rebranded as Grab ¹. Tan was a speaker at the World Economic Forum in 2019 and a founding member of the AI for Good Global Commission ¹. In November 2023 Grab faced boycotts in Indonesia and Malaysia after an Instagram story by his wife Chloe Tong, posted during a family heritage trip to Israel, resurfaced in which she expressed being "completely in love" with the country — the article presents the post as hers, not as a statement of his ¹. No text read for this record names a faith for Tan himself — the articles in all four languages are silent and Wikidata carries no religion statement for him — so his faith is recorded as unknown ^{1 5 3}.

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