Billionaire Panda Express co-CEO says he never got burned out—even after years of working 12-hour days: ‘That’s life’

Work-life balance has become a major priority for Gen Z, with young workers increasingly placing a premium on maximizing time away from their jobs—even ranking it above pay in some surveys.

But work-life balance has never been much of a priority for Panda Express cofounder Andrew Cherng.

Even at 78, the self-made billionaire restaurateur has long embraced the demanding schedules and relentless work ethic that helped him build the largest Asian-American restaurant chain in the U.S.

“It was hard when I had no business, there was no income,” he said after recently being asked by NBC News on how to avoid burnout.

“But even then, I wasn’t burned out because, you just work, go to work, and [if] you have a like a 12-hour day, you go home, you sleep well—I mean that’s life.” And that mindset helped him and his wife, Peggy, turn a single family-run restaurant into a nearly $7 billion-a-year global chain over five decades.

It has also helped propel their net worths to an estimated $6.6 billion collectively.

How two immigrants turned $60,000 into an empire serving 148 million pounds of orange chicken a year Andrew Cherng was born in Yangzhou, China, in 1948.

When he was 5, his family fled to Taiwan, and eight years later, they moved again, this time to Japan.

He eventually made his way to the U.S., enrolling at Baker University in Kansas to study mathematics.

There, he met his future wife, Peggy, who was Burmese-born and would go on to become his business partner and now serves as Panda Express’ co-CEO .

The couple later earned master’s degrees from the University of Missouri.

“Every holiday I had, I worked in New York, waiting tables in a restaurant,” Andrew recalled to Fortune in 2013 .

“My father was a chef but hadn’t owned his own business.

I didn’t like that.