ByteDance Employee Leto Bao Gains Over Fivefold on Seagate Stock; Guo Yu Retires at 28 with Options Worth Over

ByteDance employee Leto Bao purchased two Seagate hard drives on Pinduoduo in August last year and noticed their prices continued to rise. He analyzed that AI model training generates massive amounts of data, requiring mechanical hard drives for long-term storage, and that cloud vendors such as Microsoft and Amazon were purchasing in large quantities, leading to shortages and price increases at the retail end. He reviewed Seagate’s financial reports and institutional holdings data, confirming that professional funds had entered the market. He then bought Seagate stock at around $150, and the price later rose to as high as $965. Bao had started trading stocks in 2020 and previously lost 400,000 yuan after borrowing a loan. He later turned over $20,000 into $2 million within a week through weekly options, a 100-fold return, after which he became a trend investor.

Another early ByteDance employee, Guo Yu, joined the company in 2014 and received hundreds of thousands of stock options. Six years later, the options were valued at 200 times the original, worth over 100 million yuan, and he retired at age 28. Guo Yu came from a small city in Jiangxi province, where his father was ill and his mother supported the family alone. He taught himself programming, interned at Alipay in his junior year, and later joined ByteDance.