With a fortune of $57.5 billion, Zhang now ranks as the third richest man in Asia behind Indian billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, according the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
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Zhang Yiming, founder and CEO of tech company Bytedance, attends a meeting in Fuzhou city, southeast China’s Fujian province, 18 June 2016. Photo by Reuters |
Although this was the first time Bloomberg places Zhang as the richest person in China, in October last year he was crowned the title by the annual wealth ranking list Hurun China Rich List.
Zhang’s fortune has surged by over $10 billion following Bloomberg’s assessment of valuations from investors such as BlackRock Inc., Fidelity Investments, and T. Rowe Price Group Inc., combined with ByteDance’s initiative to repurchase employee stock at a $312 billion valuation. The average valuation from these four sources reached $365 billion.
For the 41-year-old, this marks a recovery after a challenging phase that included the threat of a U.S. TikTok ban and a temporary withdrawal of music from the platform by the world’s largest record label.
TikTok’s future in the U.S. remains uncertain. President Donald Trump extended the deadline for ByteDance to sell its U.S. operations by 75 days, setting it to April 5, allowing time to find a buyer or face a ban.
In China, ByteDance stands out as a key player in the artificial intelligence sector. Its AI chatbot, Doubao, boasts 75 million regular active users, and the company promotes its earlier vision understanding model as 85% more cost-effective than the industry average.
“Zhang is different from the previous generations of ‘made in China’ billionaires because the business is more innovative and global-oriented,” said Hao Gao, a director at Tsinghua University’s Research Center for Global Family Business.
Zhang, a Chinese citizen residing in Singapore, amassed his wealth solely through his 21% ownership of ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, which has over 1 billion users.
Zhang began his career as an engineer at Kuxun.com, a tourism search site. In 2009, he launched his first venture, 99fang.com, a property search platform, which he left after three years.
In 2012, Zhang founded ByteDance in a modest Beijing apartment, introducing the Toutiao news app, which gained over 13 million daily users within two years. His goal was to build an AI-driven platform distinct from China’s dominant search engine, Baidu.
“The most important thing is that we are not a news business,” Zhang explained in a 2017 interview. “We are more like a search business or a social media platform. We are doing very innovative work. We are not a copycat of a U.S. company, both in product and technology.”
In 2016, ByteDance debuted TikTok, locally known as Douyin, initially attracting a small following. The app quickly captivated Gen Z and millennials, achieving global popularity in the years that followed. Two years later, ByteDance acquired Musical.ly, a Chinese social media platform, for approximately $800 million and merged it into TikTok.
By cultivating a range of successful apps, ByteDance has grown into a diverse empire encompassing video and various platforms covering everything from humor to celebrity news.
In 2021, Zhang relinquished his role as chief executive and, a few months later, stepped down as chairman.
Several of his billionaire peers, such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Jack Ma and PDD Holdings Inc.’s Colin Huang, have similarly stepped back from active leadership at their companies.
