Come on, let's see who bludgeons whom to death!

It took the investors more than two hours just to determine their valuations and make their offers, not even counting the days they had previously spent calculating valuations within their own companies.

As for Li Daniur and Ender, they took only five minutes to review the proposals and another five minutes of discussion to ultimately select five investor representatives to advance to the second round.

Although many individuals lost their investment eligibility, they did not leave immediately. They believed that perhaps subsequent negotiations might fall through. Such a scenario was not entirely impossible; history was filled with financing plans that had been cancelled at the last minute due to various reasons.

Putting aside those investors who still harbored expectations and awaited opportunities, as well as the reporters eager to secure breaking news, Li Daniur began holding meetings inside his palace with the representatives of the second-round investors, and in some cases, the investors themselves.

The word "audience" or "meeting" was used because this was the Royal Palace of Tuvalu, and Li Daniur was the King of Tuvalu.

Regardless of how much wealth one possessed or how formidable one's influence might be, one fundamental rule had to be respected: this was his territory, and here, he called the shots.

With this attitude, Li Daniur approached the negotiations without the slightest timidity, pitching exorbitant valuations right from the start.

The first investor he met was the world-renowned Citigroup, an institution encompassing commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance services. These were all businesses wielding massive cash flows, which explained why their bid was the highest among all submitted proposals.

Their valuation of TC Network was eighty billion US dollars.

"With all due respect, I will only cede a maximum of 10% equity." Li Daniur opened by immediately striking down Citigroup's demand for a sixty percent stake. It was absurd to think that capitalists of this caliber, once holding sixty percent of the shares, would not eventually dilute his ownership through capital increases.

In other words, if the current valuation was eighty billion dollars and both parties subsequently invested another forty billion dollars each into TC Network—and should Li Daniur be unable to scrape together his share, no matter, Citigroup could inject the entire eighty billion themselves—his ownership stake would be slashed by more than half.

How could Li Daniur dare to compete in a deep-pockets contest against a banking giant?

In the end, while TC Network's market capitalization might reach astronomical heights, Li Daniur himself might be left with merely a single-digit percentage of shares.

Ten percent equity in a company valued at three hundred billion dollars was worth thirty billion dollars or even less. But ninety percent equity in a company valued at eighty billion dollars amounted to over seventy billion.

Such was the ruthless nature of the capital market, capable of mysteriously shrinking the value of one's wealth by more than half.

The representative from Citigroup had encountered many entrepreneurs like Li Daniur—those who stubbornly refused to part with their equity at the outset, only to be forced to bow before harsh reality in the end.

"Your Majesty, I fully understand your sentiments, but doing business and founding a startup are two entirely different concepts. You must realize that even for a behemoth like Face-book, its founder currently holds only a little over twenty percent of the shares. Looking at other companies, virtually no founder of a Fortune 500 enterprise retains a 51 percent majority stake."

The Citigroup representative smiled before continuing, "I know your primary concern is that we might interfere with your development plan for WeChat. Therefore, we can guarantee that as long as any proposal or plan is beneficial to the WeChat product or TC Network as a whole, we will never reject it."

I would have to be an absolute fool to believe that!

Li Daniur sneered inwardly at the promises made by the Citigroup representative. What constitutes a "beneficial" plan? Before a plan is executed and yields visible results, no one can guarantee its success.

Promises made lightly now would inevitably lead to endless disputes and endless haggling the moment a concrete proposal was tabled, with excuses manufactured on a whim. In the end, whoever held the most equity retained the final say.

Why not promise never to interfere with operational control? Furthermore, why not promise never to arbitrarily increase capital and dilute equity?

"Ten percent equity is my absolute limit. If you cannot accept this, I cannot accept your valuation of eighty billion dollars either. Frankly speaking, a valuation of eighty billion dollars falls quite short of my internal expectations."

The representative from Citibank was not surprised by Li Daniur's resolute stance.

Financing negotiations of this magnitude were never resolved in a single meeting; they required days, or sometimes even months, of gradual haggling and counter-offers between the two sides. Even after a financing agreement was reached, formulating the detailed contracts would take more than a single day.

After exchanging a few polite pleasantries, the two parties agreed to continue discussions at a later date.

Once the Citibank representative departed, Li Daniur began meeting with the other investor representatives.

Among them were investment firms similar to Citigroup, behemoths like Sequoia Capital managing over 18 funds, as well as Face-book and Winner Corporation.

Winner Corporation was a dominant computer operating systems company. Nearly ninety-nine percent of the computers in the world utilized their operating system. Unlike Microsoft from his past life, there was no Apple macOS competing against them in this world.

Having concluded meetings with all five companies, Li Daniur realized that there were truly no fools in this world, especially among the wealthy.

Their unanimous stance was a demand for a controlling stake of fifty percent or higher.

A valuation of eighty billion dollars? No problem, they were willing to shell out forty billion dollars or even more, but they demanded upwards of fifty percent of the shares in return.

Normally, securing an eighty-billion-dollar valuation during a first funding round would already be considered a miraculous feat.

Moreover, the funds generated by parting with over fifty percent of the equity would not all be plowed back into TC Network.

In other words, raising ten billion dollars through a ten percent equity stake to fund TC Network's expansion was acceptable. However, Li Daniur would be required to sell forty percent of his personal shares to them, money that would go straight into his own private pockets.

With just a single nod of assent, a software created over twenty days with an initial investment of four hundred million dollars could be exchanged for over thirty billion dollars in cash, alongside a forty percent stake in an enterprise valued at eighty billion dollars.

For any entrepreneur, this was an unimaginable proposition—a deal that should be accepted without a moment's hesitation.

The logic was simple: if you refused, these tycoons could easily cough up one billion dollars to launch a competing software and wrestle market share away from you. In the end, wouldn't the losses outweigh the gains?

However, Li Daniur knew that financial arithmetic did not work that way.

Investment was investment, and entrepreneurship was entrepreneurship.

Face-book commanded such a massive market cap that investors could easily have deployed tens of billions of dollars to build an identical social networking site from scratch, even using capital to outright buy up users. Yet, why did those investors prefer holding a mere five percent or less of Face-book rather than creating a competing company of their own?

In his past life, countless individuals who failed to acquire shares in the Alibaba Group—or who were unwilling to pay a high price for them—founded similar companies themselves. And what was the outcome? Did any of them ever reach a market capitalization exceeding two trillion?

The capital wielded by investment firms was rarely their own money; it belonged to their clients.

Clients permitted them to invest in promising ventures, but would never consent to them squandering funds to start rival companies of their own.

Furthermore, WeChat already boasted over four billion users. If not for the time required to prepare for an IPO and clear various regulatory hurdles, Li Daniur wouldn't have needed outside financing at all; he could have gone public directly to cash in.

WeChat was akin to Alibaba on the verge of going public—choosing a primary financing round instead of a direct public offering. One could only imagine the immense scale of its underlying value.

A typical internet startup might require only tens of millions in its first funding round, hundreds of millions in the second, and a few hundred million in the third.

Yet, when Li Daniur launched his venture, capital was never an issue. Having already poured four hundred million dollars to rapidly mature WeChat into a powerhouse, he possessed the confidence to demand exorbitant valuations and had no fear of rivals attempting to capture market share with smaller budgets.

After consulting with Ender, Li Daniur formulated his strategy and scheduled subsequent meetings with the selected investors. Following intense negotiations, the final financing package was established:

Citibank would invest six billion US dollars in exchange for a 10% equity stake in TC Network.

Sequoia Capital would invest 4.2 billion US dollars in exchange for a 7.5% equity stake in TC Network.

Face-book would transfer 3% of its own equity in exchange for a 15.5% stake in TC Network.

Aside from granting Li Daniur veto power, the position of Chairman, and barring other shareholders from arbitrarily demanding capital increases without justification, the detailed clauses required little elaboration.

The primary reason Li Daniur agreed to let Face-book exchange equity was to leverage Face-book's massive user base—amounting to one billion users—and channel them directly into WeChat. Once user migration was complete, WeChat would stand immune to any competitors of its kind anywhere in the world.

Based on Face-book's current market valuation of 320 billion US dollars, a 3% stake translated to roughly 9.6 billion US dollars. Moreover, once the news broke, Face-book's market capitalization was bound to surge, making that stake worth even more than 9.6 billion dollars.

As for which specific Face-book shareholders would surrender that 3% stake, or how the 15.5% TC Network shares would be distributed internally among them, those were internal matters for Face-book to resolve independently and had nothing to do with Li Daniur.

Naturally, strict restrictions governed the methods by which Li Daniur could eventually cash out his 3% Face-book shares; arbitrary liquidation was strictly prohibited. But Li Daniur was no fool—why would anyone casually liquidate an asset guaranteed to appreciate in value?

Furthermore, the capital provided by Citigroup and Sequoia Capital would not be poured entirely into TC Network. Half of their respective investments would be funneled directly into Li Daniur's pocket as a cash-out payment, while the remaining half would belong to TC Network.

On the surface, this appeared to disadvantage Li Daniur. After all, if the remaining funds proved insufficient for TC Network's expansion—such as funding future acquisitions or launching new business ventures—capital increases would become mandatory. And should capital increases occur, the deep pockets of Citigroup or Sequoia Capital could easily dilute Li Daniur's shareholding below fifty percent, or even lower.

Yet, in Li Daniur's view, by the time TC Network exhausted those funds, it remained to be seen who would command greater wealth.

A capital increase?

Bring it on. Let's see whose financial muscle cracks first.