The arrogant Wang Tao took eight years to learn to bow his head.

If you search for Wang Tao, the founder of DJI, on the Internet, you will definitely come across that quote.

"The world is incredibly stupid."

There's no context, no antecedent or subsequent explanation. Just this single statement, hanging there bare, setting Wang Tao apart from other Chinese entrepreneurs.

Lei Jun talks about pigs soaring in the wind, Ren Zhengfei emphasizes survival, and Wang Tao says the world is incredibly stupid. Such blatant arrogance has become a unique spectacle.

This quote has been cited for a decade.

Some mock him, some admire him, and some even paste it beside the whiteboard in startup offices, regarding it as a unique quote only geniuses are entitled to utter.

However, after a decade of silence, Wang Tao granted an interview to Later. This was his first real attempt to communicate with the public.

In the interview, he completed the quote:

"The world is incredibly stupid, and so am I."

With just three additional words, the least - known door in the twenty - year entrepreneurial history of DJI was opened.

1. The Loneliness of a Genius

In 2005, Wang Tao was still a graduate student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, holding a remote - controlled helicopter that wouldn't fly no matter what. He believed he could fix it and create the world's best - flying drones.

And he actually did it.

At the age of three, he looked at models in the shop window. Ten years later, he took apart and reassembled remote - controlled helicopters. Another ten years later, DJI's drones flew all over the world. It would be strange if such a person weren't arrogant.

In 2012, DJI released the world's first consumer - grade aerial photography drone, the Phantom 1. Since then, competitors have almost all been defeated one by one. In 2016, the Mavic Pro folding drone emerged, freezing the entire industry in place. By 2024, DJI's revenue exceeded 80 billion yuan, and its global market share in the consumer - grade drone market exceeded 70%. In this category, DJI is almost the only answer.

At that time, Wang Tao had every reason to believe that the world was indeed incredibly stupid, and he was not part of it.

His product intuition was like a superpower. He could spot pain points at a glance and directly propose the optimal solutions. When those around him couldn't do the same, he would be puzzled: How could you not do such a simple thing?

It wasn't that he was condescending; he genuinely couldn't understand why others couldn't see what he saw.

The loneliness of a genius often takes the form of arrogance.

Driven by this arrogance, the company rushed forward at full speed. It was DJI's idyllic era. Products could be freely tested for errors; budgets didn't need approval. Everyone was in a "can do anything" state, like a group of adventurers under a pirate flag.

In the interview, he recalled that they spent 9 million yuan to shoot an advertisement in South Africa. The final product was mediocre, but everyone was happy because there were no KPIs, no ROI, only passion and dreams.

Wang Tao later said: He never wanted to go back to that so - called idyllic era.

2. The First Crack

In 2017, DJI did something no one had anticipated: It exposed internal corruption on its own.

In the supply - chain procurement process, items were purchased at a 25% higher price. Upon investigation, it was found that there were problems not only in procurement but also in R & D. Further inspection revealed that almost every department had formed its own fiefdoms. The founding employees, core backbones, and early shareholders, the very people Wang Tao trusted, had been acting independently in a parallel world he knew nothing about.

When he went to talk to the superior of a suspect, the latter's first reaction was: You can't wrong anyone!

At that moment, Wang Tao realized that no one in the company was willing to speak from the company's perspective.

In 2019, DJI released an anti - corruption notice. Due to supply - chain corruption, the company suffered losses of over 1 billion yuan. Forty - five employees were disciplined, and sixteen were handed over to the judicial authorities.

This was a public self - dissection.

But what shocked him more than the corruption itself was the sense of loss of control.

He found that a person who was invincible in product development was almost illiterate in management. He didn't know how to design an organization, how to deal with human nature, how to establish rules, or how to transmit corporate culture. During the years when he was solely focused on product development, the bottom of the company's "ship" was quietly taking in water.

Tens of thousands of "I don't know"s and "Why"s were suddenly presented before him.

"The collapse of rituals and music," this was the term he used in the interview to describe that period.

This concept from Confucius was unexpectedly and accurately used by the founder of a Shenzhen - based tech company to describe the collapse of his organization. Rituals represent rules and order; music symbolizes centripetal force and values. When a company substitutes passion for rules and sentiment for systems for too long, it will eventually reach that critical moment.

The rituals collapsed, and the music faded away.

His way of handling the situation later became the target of self - criticism.

"I adopted a confrontational approach, which generated a lot of resentment," he said.

Just like when Monkey King struck with his staff, he found that the pit he created was even bigger than the damage caused by the monster itself. Simultaneously promoting anti - corruption and organizational restructuring with excessive force led to a more fragmented workforce.

During that period, DJI lost a large number of core talents, including early - stage R & D backbones, product managers, and technology leaders.

And these people who left later became his most formidable competitors one by one.

3. The Paradox of the "Whampoa Military Academy": DJI's Blood Loss and Blood Transfusion

There is a saying in the Chinese tech circle that DJI is the "Whampoa Military Academy" for hardware startups.

Tao Ye, the founder of Tuozhu Technology, left DJI and, together with four other former DJI employees, turned 3D printers into a leading brand in the global consumer - grade market. The founding team of EcoFlow also came from DJI and has expanded outdoor energy storage to a scale of tens of billions. From drones to 3D printing, from energy storage to robotics, the entrepreneurial map of former DJI employees covers the entire consumer hardware ecosystem.

The outside world regards this as an honor, but Wang Tao didn't see it that way at first.

He said that many of the so - called "Whampoa - trained" companies didn't succeed. He didn't want DJI to be a company that exported talent only to be beaten by its own protégés.

But he couldn't stop this from happening.

According to Wang Tao himself, DJI's management reform was a transition from a wild - growth model to a systematic one, from being driven by passion to being result - oriented.

During this process, the early - stage technical talents, who were good at innovation, accustomed to freedom, and highly individualistic, clashed with the new order. The company needed them to transform into managers, but many of them were neither suitable nor willing. External capital was eagerly waiting on the sidelines to recruit them.

So they left.

A cruel paradox: The price of DJI's management reform was pushing out the most creative people, who then became DJI's most difficult - to - deal - with opponents.

But the story doesn't end here.

There is another group of people. They have never worked at DJI but are launching direct attacks on it.

Liu Jingkang, the founder of Insta360, was born in 1991, graduated from the School of Software at Nanjing University, and started his business during college without ever working at DJI. Yu Hao, the founder of Dreame Technology, majored in aerospace at Tsinghua University and was one of the earliest researchers of quad - rotor drones in China. He also has no direct talent connection with DJI.

One of them used panoramic cameras to penetrate DJI's imaging territory, and the other made vacuum cleaners grow at a faster rate than DJI. In the interview, Wang Tao described Liu Jingkang as a "Red Boy" - young, energetic, and self - made, not from DJI's system.

This means that the competition DJI faces is more complex than just nurturing its own opponents: It's not only losing blood but also being directly attacked by external new forces.

4. Patent Wars: Competition Escalates to the Courtroom

In July 2025, Insta360 officially announced its entry into the drone market. At the end of the month, DJI immediately launched its first panoramic camera product, directly entering Insta360's core territory.

Since then, the intensity of competition has rapidly escalated, from product wars and price wars to supply - chain pressure and finally to the courtroom.

The R & D director of Insta360's drone, the Yingling A1, publicly stated that on the eve of mass production, a core component supplier suddenly called, saying they were under pressure from DJI and could no longer provide supplies.

In March 2026, DJI officially sued Insta360 at the Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court, involving six patent - ownership disputes. This was DJI's first domestic patent - ownership lawsuit in its history.

The core of DJI's accusation is that within one year after leaving DJI, several former core R & D employees applied for patents highly relevant to their previous positions in the name of Insta360, mainly in areas such as drone flight control, structural design, and image processing.

There are also more notable details. Insta360 marked some inventors as "requesting anonymity" in its domestic patent applications, but in the corresponding international patent applications (PCT), due to mandatory disclosure requirements, the real names of these people, who were former DJI R & D employees, were clearly shown.

Insta360 strongly counterattacked.

Liu Jingkang publicly stated that the ideas for the involved patents came from himself and counter - accused several DJI products of infringing 11 Insta360 hardware patents, 8 software patents, and 6 control - method patents. He also said that he understood the mindset of a giant after losing market share.

Meanwhile, on March 26 this year, DJI launched the Avata 360 panoramic drone, priced at 2,788 yuan, directly targeting the core market of the Yingling A1. According to IDC data in 2025, Insta360 maintained its first - place position in the global panoramic camera market with a 66% market share; according to Jiuqian Consulting, DJI still led the handheld intelligent imaging field with a 55% share.

The battlefield between the two companies has expanded from a single product category to a comprehensive ecological offensive and defensive battle.

This is a true reflection of what Wang Tao described as "fighting on all fronts": For each of DJI's more than a dozen business lines, there stands a mature listed company or unicorn on the opposite side.

And in the imaging business line, the opponents are not only in the front but also have flanked and entered the courtroom.

5. Eight Years of Catching Up

Since 2017, Wang Tao has been doing something he previously thought "not too difficult": learning management.

It took him eight years.

He reorganized the procurement, R & D, sales, and marketing departments, and then re - reorganized the procurement department version 2.0. He prohibited employees from wearing slippers into the building. The outside world thought he was being controlling, but Wang Tao believed it was just the starting point of collectivism.

He invented terms like "single - brain stirring" to describe the centralization of decision - making, used "entropy reduction" to define the essence of management, and "the first cosmic velocity" to define the critical point of organizational capabilities.

These concepts may sound abstract, but each one represents a real pitfall. Paying 25% more in procurement, core backbones leaving with patents, and spending 9 million yuan on an advertisement that no one watched are all examples of these pitfalls.

He said that product development was a 1 - point difficulty for him, while management was a 10 - point challenge. Product development was a talent, and management was something to be learned later in life.

A talent honed over more than twenty years and a shortcoming overcome in eight years coexist in him.

When DJI emerged from these eight years, it became a more stable but less exciting company. Some people said it had lost its soul, while others said it had finally grown up.

Wang Tao's assessment is that the organization's score has increased from 30 to 65, but it hasn't reached 70 yet. That "first cosmic velocity" of management he mentioned means that once crossed, the organization can be self - driven; otherwise, it may regress at any time.

He is still climbing that slope.

6. Why Now?

This is the most pressing question.

There must be a reason for a person to remain silent for a decade, and there must also be a reason for a person to choose to speak up at a certain point in time.

The answers lie in several details of the interview.

First, DJI is recruiting on a large scale.

Wang Tao said that 2025 marked a new stage, characterized by large - scale recruitment, and he personally restarted the interview process. A founder who is back to recruit needs to be re - recognized by the outside world.

After ten years of silence, new candidates' impressions of you come from the old photo of the "incredibly stupid world" quote and the rumors of a hot - tempered and autocratic person. If you don't refresh your image, it will be locked in by the old narrative.

Second, the stories of former employees are replacing his own story.

Names like Tao Ye and the EcoFlow team frequently appear in tech media. They talk about DJI, how their experiences there shaped them, and the freedom and passion of that time.

These stories are true but one - sided. They describe the first half of DJI's history, obscuring the more difficult and real second half.

If Wang Tao doesn't speak up, the story of DJI will be told by others.

Third, the competitive situation requires his presence.

The patent war and supply - chain tug - of - war between DJI and Insta360 are no longer just internal business games but have become a public opinion war.

Liu Jingkang is active on Weibo, gives media interviews, and publicly challenges DJI. Every step he takes is shaping the labels of "DJI = conservative giant" and "Insta360 = dynamic challenger." In this narrative, the silent Wang Tao is naturally at a disadvantage.

The voice of the founder himself is irreplaceable by any public relations team.

Fourth, he has achieved some internal integration.

Wang Tao said that he seemed to have shed his old self and started to grow. He even said that he had found the fourth "corner" that was previously missing: A relationship beyond interests between people, a connection of jointly pursuing the truth.

The person who felt that "something was wrong" in 2016 but couldn't find an answer was struck by a conversation between Zigong and Confucius one night while reading The Analects.

He said that at that moment, he exclaimed "Wow!" in his heart and was excited for a long time. When a person achieves some internal closure, they naturally want to speak up.

It's not for the sake of expression. It's because there is finally something worth saying.

7. The Real Meaning of the Second Half of the Quote

"The world is incredibly stupid, and so am I."

Just looking at this sentence, it's easy to regard it as a gesture, a form of modesty for entrepreneurs or a show of weakness in public relations. But after reading the full interview in Later, you'll find that it's more like a genuine confession.

Wang Tao has been making up for his deficiencies. It took him eight years to learn what he knew nothing about when he became the CEO at the age of 26. He also admitted that if there had been stronger competitors back then, DJI would have gone bankrupt long ago: Fortunately, the competitors were inactive during those years.