In the Autumn of 2007, Facebook was an upstart challenger to the now defunct MySpace.

It was early days for social networks, but a couple of investments put a $15bn valuation on the company, making a paper billionaire out of founder Mark Zuckerberg. One of those investors was Microsoft, the other was a very old, very rich man from the other side of the world, Li Ka-shing.

Mr Li, one of Asia’s richest tycoons whose business empire spans property, retail and ports, followed up with investments in Spotify, the music site now heading towards an IPO; Siri, the voice software bought by Apple; Summly, recently taken over by Yahoo; Waze and Deepmind, both taken out by Google in recent months; and Misfits, one of the handful of upstarts leading the way in wearable tech.