Richard Liu and Serena Williams have no documented connection of any kind. They have never worked together, never invested together, and are not related. Part of the confusion has a simple explanation: Serena Williams’s father and first coach is named Richard Williams, and he is a completely different man from Richard Liu, the Chinese founder of JD.com. Different countries, different industries, different lives.
Richard Liu built JD.com from a four-square-metre electronics stall in Beijing into China’s largest retailer by revenue, then stepped down as its chief executive in 2022 and remains its chairman. Serena Williams won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the most of the Open Era, stepped away from tennis in 2022, built a venture capital firm, and then, to the astonishment of the sporting world, walked back onto a professional court in 2026.
Here is who each of them is, what each actually did, and what the record does and does not show about any link between them.
Quick Facts
| Detail | Richard Liu | Serena Williams |
|---|---|---|
| Full name | Liu Qiangdong | Serena Jameka Williams |
| Born | 1973 or 1974, Suqian, Jiangsu, China (sources differ on the exact date) | 26 September 1981, Lynwood, California |
| Known for | Founder and chairman of JD.com | 23 Grand Slam singles titles |
| Education | Renmin University of China (sociology) | Turned professional at 14 |
| Signature achievement | Took JD.com from a tiny Beijing shop to China’s largest retailer by revenue | Most Grand Slam singles titles won in the Open Era |
| In 2026 | Chairman of JD.com, JD Health and JD Logistics | Returned to professional tennis at Queen’s Club in June 2026 |
| Spouse | Zhang Zetian | Alexis Ohanian |
| Documented link | None | None |
Who Is Richard Liu?
Richard Liu, whose Chinese name is Liu Qiangdong, was born in Suqian, in the northern part of China’s Jiangsu province, in 1973 or 1974. Published sources disagree on his exact birth date, an unusual gap in the biography of so public a businessman, and this article notes the disagreement rather than hiding it. What is not disputed is the poverty he started from: he grew up in a farming village, his parents earned their living shipping goods on the region’s waterways, and the family had very little.
He was a standout student, and in 1992 he won a place at the Renmin University of China in Beijing, one of the country’s top universities. By his own often-told account, he arrived in the capital with 500 yuan pooled together by his family and fellow villagers, and a supply of eggs for food. He studied sociology, taught himself computer programming on the side, and took small programming jobs to support himself. He graduated in 1996.
His first job was with Japan Life, a Japanese health products company, where he worked on computer systems and business operations for two years. In 1998 he quit, rented a tiny stall in Beijing’s Zhongguancun electronics district, and went into business for himself. He named the business Jingdong, combining a character from his own name with one from the name of his first girlfriend, as he has himself acknowledged. That stall, four square metres of counter space selling magneto-optical products and disc recorders, was the seed of JD.com.
Liu: From a Market Stall to China’s Largest Retailer
The young business grew quickly in the physical market, and by 2003 Liu had opened about a dozen shops. Then the SARS epidemic emptied Beijing’s streets and markets, his sales collapsed, and he was forced to think differently. He began selling online, first through internet forums, and at the start of 2004 he closed his shops and launched an online store. The business sold consumer electronics first, then expanded into almost everything. In 2013 it adopted the short name it uses today, JD.com.
Two choices defined it. The first was authenticity: in a market plagued by counterfeits, JD sold only genuine goods sourced directly from brands and authorised suppliers, and it made that promise the centre of its identity. The second was logistics. From 2007 Liu began building JD’s own delivery network, warehouses and couriers and all, an unfashionable and expensive decision that rivals mocked at the time. It became the company’s deepest advantage, a platform of warehouses and couriers that made same-day and next-day delivery routine across China.
Investors followed. Tencent, the owner of WeChat, took a strategic stake in 2014 and gave JD prominent entry points inside China’s dominant messaging apps. In May 2014 JD listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York, raising about $1.8 billion in what was then the largest American share offering by a Chinese company. The group’s health and logistics arms, JD Health and JD Logistics, later listed in Hong Kong, in 2020 and 2021, and Liu chairs both companies. JD’s annual revenue passed one trillion yuan in 2022, and the group sits in the top tier of the Fortune Global 500.
Liu: Stepping Back, and the Hard Years
In August 2018 Liu was arrested in Minneapolis, in the United States, on suspicion of criminal sexual conduct during a business trip. He was released the next day, and in December 2018 prosecutors announced that they would not charge him, citing insufficient evidence. A civil lawsuit followed, and it was settled in October 2022, shortly before a trial, with both sides describing the episode as a misunderstanding. The case is recorded here briefly because it is a documented part of his public story, and because it shaped the years that followed.
From 2020 he steadily withdrew from front-line roles at JD’s subsidiary companies. In April 2022 he stepped down as chief executive of JD.com itself, handing the role to Xu Lei, who was succeeded in May 2023 by Sandy Ran Xu. Liu remains chairman, focused on long-term strategy, and he has hardly vanished: in late 2022 he returned to a more visible role, warning staff in blunt internal messages that the company had grown complacent, and from 2025 he pushed JD into an expensive new fight, launching a food delivery service against the entrenched market leader Meituan.
His public giving has followed the rural focus he talks about often. In February 2022 he announced that he would donate JD shares then worth about $2.3 billion to charity, one of the largest single donations ever made by a Chinese entrepreneur, directed largely toward education and rural development.
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Who Is Serena Williams?
Serena Jameka Williams was born on 26 September 1981 in Lynwood, California, the youngest of five sisters, and she grew up in Compton. Her father, Richard Williams, famously wrote a plan for his daughters’ tennis careers before they were born, and he coached Serena and her sister Venus on cracked public courts. She entered professional tennis in 1995, days after her fourteenth birthday, stepping into a sport that had never seen a player quite like her.
The breakthrough came at the 1999 US Open, where the 17-year-old beat the world number one, Martina Hingis, in the final to win her first Grand Slam singles title. It was the first of 23, more than any player in the Open Era. She won seven titles at the Australian Open and seven at Wimbledon, six at the US Open and three at the French Open. Twice she held all four major titles at the same time, in 2002 and 2003 and again in 2014 and 2015, a feat the sport simply named after her: the Serena Slam.
With Venus she also won 14 Grand Slam doubles titles, and she collected four Olympic gold medals, one in singles and three in doubles. She spent 319 weeks as world number one. In January 2017 she won the Australian Open without dropping a set while about eight weeks pregnant, a detail that emerged only afterwards and that still reads like fiction. No serious account of tennis history now argues about her place in it: she is the defining player of her era.
Williams: Evolving Away, Investing, and the Comeback Nobody Predicted
In August 2022 she announced in Vogue that she was moving on, refusing to use the word retirement:
I’m here to tell you that I’m evolving away from tennis, toward other things that are important to me.
Her farewell run ended at the 2022 US Open, in the third round against Ajla Tomljanovic, in front of crowds that treated every match as a ceremony. What she evolved toward was business. Years earlier she had quietly begun investing her own money in startups, work that was formalised as Serena Ventures. In 2022 the firm raised a $111 million inaugural fund. It has since backed more than 90 companies, among them 14 that reached billion-dollar valuations, and the firm reports that 79 percent of its portfolio companies were founded by people from underrepresented backgrounds. As an investor, she had become a significant figure in early-stage technology in her own right.
Sport stayed in the portfolio too. She and Venus had bought a minority stake in the Miami Dolphins back in 2009, becoming the first Black women to hold an ownership stake in an NFL team. She became a founding investor in Angel City FC, the Los Angeles women’s football club, joined the ownership of a Los Angeles team in the TGL golf league, and in 2025 invested in the Toronto Tempo, the WNBA’s first Canadian franchise.
Then the story bent back on itself. In late 2025 her name reappeared on tennis’s anti-doping testing list, the bureaucratic first step any returning player must take. She denied everything on social media, posting that she was NOT coming back, but in January 2026, asked directly on television, she would not close the door: “That’s not a yes or no. I don’t know. I’m just gonna see what happens.” In June 2026, aged 44, she completed one of the most unexpected comeback stories in modern sport, returning at the Queen’s Club Championships in London. Playing doubles with Canada’s 19-year-old Victoria Mboko, she won her first match in 1,375 days, beating the third seeds in straight sets, before the pair withdrew from the quarterfinals when Mboko injured a knee.
The summer became a reunion tour rather than a title hunt: doubles in Berlin alongside Karolina Muchova, a singles return at Wimbledon that took the young Australian Maya Joint to three sets on Centre Court, doubles with Venus at Cincinnati and the US Open, and a mixed doubles win alongside Carlos Alcaraz in New York. By September 2026 Williams was describing the return as nothing long-term, with no fixed schedule announced. The door, famously, remains exactly as open as she wants it.
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The Connection Question: Richard Liu and Serena Williams
Is there any real connection between Richard Liu and Serena Williams? On the public record, none. There is no record of them meeting, working together, investing together or appearing at the same event in any capacity that produced a documented link. JD.com has never sponsored her, Serena Ventures has never announced an investment involving JD, and no reliable report joins their names.
The one genuine source of confusion is a name. Serena’s father is Richard Williams, the coach who raised two champions in Compton. Richard Liu is a Chinese retail founder from Jiangsu. The two men share a first name and nothing else, and any article or search result that blurs them is making a mistake, not a discovery.
What the pairing really rests on is a parallel. Both built their positions from the very bottom of their worlds, a village boy with 500 yuan on one side and public courts in Compton on the other. Both dominated through infrastructure that others undervalued, his warehouses and delivery network, her power game and the business machine she built around her talent. And both, in their forties, refused the quiet ending: he stepped back from the chief executive’s office only to keep steering strategy, while she stepped away from tennis entirely and then walked back in.
Personal Lives
Richard Liu’s family life is mostly private by Chinese tech-founder standards, with one famous exception. In 2015 he married Zhang Zetian, who had become a national internet celebrity as a teenager when a photograph of her holding a cup of milk tea went viral, earning her the nickname Sister Milk Tea. She went on to graduate from Tsinghua University, spent time as an exchange student at Barnard College in New York, and built her own career as an investor and fashion business figure. The couple keep their children largely out of public view, and this article follows that choice.
Williams married Alexis Ohanian in November 2017, in New Orleans. Ohanian co-founded the social platform Reddit in 2005 and has since become a prominent technology investor and one of the loudest advocates for women’s sport. Their first daughter, Olympia, was born in September 2017, and a second daughter, Adira, followed in August 2023. Both girls are minors and appear in this article in words only. When Williams made her comeback at Queen’s in June 2026, Ohanian and their daughters were in the stands cheering her on, in photographs carried around the world.
What They Share, and What They Do Not
Set side by side, the two careers rhyme in clear ways:
- Both rose from poor childhoods to the very top of global industries, retail and sport.
- Both built infrastructure that others undervalued, his delivery network, her investment firm.
- Both stepped back in 2022, and then, in very different ways, moved back toward the centre of their worlds.
- Both are known for blunt directness about standards, his internal warnings to JD staff, her refusal to soften her ambition in public.
The differences are just as clear:
- Liu is a founder who still steers his company’s strategy from the chairman’s office; Williams built her second career in investing while her first career was ending.
- His world is Chinese e-commerce and logistics; hers is global sport, media and venture capital.
- Williams’s family is part of her public story; Liu’s is kept almost entirely private.
- They have no documented meeting, partnership, investment or family link of any kind.
What Is Known and What Is Not Public
| Claim | Status |
|---|---|
| Liu founded the business that became JD.com in 1998 | Documented |
| Liu stepped down as JD.com chief executive in April 2022 and remains chairman | Documented |
| Williams won 23 Grand Slam singles titles | Documented |
| Williams returned to professional tennis at Queen’s Club in June 2026 | Documented |
| Any business partnership or investment link between Liu and Williams | No evidence in any reliable source |
| Liu is related to Serena Williams’s father | No. Her father is Richard Williams, a different man entirely |
| Liu’s exact birth date | Sources differ: 10 March 1973 and 14 February 1974 both appear in print |
| Either person’s exact net worth | Not reliably documented; not stated here |
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Frequently Asked Questions
Did Richard Liu and Serena Williams ever work together?
No. There is no record of them working together, investing together or meeting in any documented setting. Liu has spent his career in Chinese retail and technology with JD.com. Williams built her career in professional tennis and, later, venture capital with Serena Ventures. Their industries and circles simply do not overlap in the public record.
Is Richard Liu related to Serena Williams?
No, and he is not her father either. Serena Williams’s father is Richard Williams, the American coach who raised Serena and Venus in Compton, California, and coached them to the top of tennis. Richard Liu is a Chinese entrepreneur from Jiangsu province. The shared first name is the entire connection, and it is a coincidence.
Is Richard Liu still the CEO of JD.com?
No. He stepped down as chief executive in April 2022 and was succeeded by Xu Lei, and then by Sandy Ran Xu in May 2023. Liu remains JD.com’s chairman, focused on long-term strategy, and he also chairs the group’s Hong Kong-listed JD Health and JD Logistics companies.
Did Serena Williams really come back to tennis in 2026?
Yes. After rejoining the sport’s anti-doping testing pool in late 2025, she returned at the Queen’s Club Championships in London in June 2026, winning a doubles match alongside Victoria Mboko, her first match in 1,375 days. She played selected events through the summer, including Wimbledon singles and doubles with Venus at the US Open, and by September 2026 she was describing the return as nothing long-term.
What is Serena Ventures?
It is Serena Williams’s venture capital firm. She began investing her own money in startups years before it was formalised, and in 2022 the firm raised a $111 million fund. It has backed more than 90 companies, and it is known for focusing on founders from underrepresented backgrounds, who the firm reports make up 79 percent of its portfolio.
Why are Richard Liu and Serena Williams searched together?
Mainly because of a name. Search engines and comparison sites pair prominent people, and the pairing looks more meaningful than it is because Serena’s father is also named Richard, which invites a false family theory. There is no event, deal or relationship behind it: the honest answer is that two famous self-made figures, one in retail and one in sport, are simply being compared.
Conclusion
Richard Liu and Serena Williams are not partners, relatives or collaborators, and this article has not pretended otherwise. He turned four square metres of Beijing counter space into a retail and logistics empire and now steers it from the chairman’s seat. She turned public courts in Compton into the greatest career in modern tennis, built a venture firm on top of it, and then did the one thing nobody expected: she played again.
Read together, they are a study in what happens after the first summit: the founder who never fully let go, and the champion who let go, built something new, and came back on her own terms. That reinvention, and a shared first name with her father, is the whole of their connection.
