Yu Hao, the CEO of Chinese home-robotics and smart-appliance maker Dreame (known in China as 追觅), has grabbed headlines by proclaiming that he aims to be the world’s richest person within five years. Speaking in a public address, Yu both taunted Elon Musk—mocking the Tesla boss’s tentative comments about “a million billion dollars”—and professed reverence for domestic rivals such as Xiaomi and Huawei, saying “Chinese people don’t fight Chinese people.” The remarks mixed hyperbole, humour and strategic positioning in equal measure.
Dreame began as a maker of robot vacuums and has over the past few years broadened into a wider smart-technology ecosystem, leaning into robotics, connected appliances and machine intelligence. Yu’s outburst is therefore not merely rhetorical showmanship; it signals an ambition to transition from a consumer-electronics vendor into a full-fledged tech platform that will be judged alongside household names such as Tesla, Nvidia, Xiaomi and Huawei. For a company accustomed to competing on product features and price, that is a large reputational leap.
Invoking Musk and Jensen Huang (the Nvidia CEO) does more than needle Western rivals. It is a positioning play intended for multiple audiences: domestic consumers and partners, international investors, and potential recruits. By framing Dreame as a peer to the architects of electric cars and AI chips, Yu seeks to rewrite expectations about where the company sits on the industry ladder, and to pre-empt comparisons that would confine it to the “appliances” category.
The claim to become the world’s richest person within five years is audacious and unlikely on its face. Yet the statement matters less for its literal plausibility than for what it reveals about strategy. Bold rhetoric can turbocharge branding, attract talent, and stiffen negotiating positions with suppliers and investors. It can also invite scrutiny—by regulators, by markets that value sober guidance, and by rivals eager to puncture overconfidence.
Dreame’s path will run up against familiar constraints. Consumer hardware margins are thin; scaling a profitable, high-growth ecosystem requires heavy investment in R&D, software and distribution. Access to advanced chips and foundry capacity remains a bottleneck that has tripped up many Chinese hardware firms aiming for AI leadership. International expansion will test Dreame on issues ranging from logistics to after-sales service to compliance with foreign standards.
For now, Yu’s remarks are a useful reminder that China’s tech entrepreneurs are increasingly comfortable with global-stage rhetoric. The practical yardsticks to watch in the coming months will be Dreame’s product road map, R&D spending, and concrete partnerships—particularly in AI and semiconductors—that could turn bravado into capability. Absent that evidence, the remarks will be remembered as a headline-grabbing bit of showmanship rather than a credible roadmap to personal or corporate supremacy.