TikTok Founder Zhang Yiming Emerges as China's Wealthiest Person

Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, is now China's richest person, worth $57.5 billion.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the 41-year-old software engineer's wealth increased by $13.6 million over the past 12 months, placing him as the 24th richest person in the world.

Next in line after Zhang are Zhong Shanshan ($54.1 billion), Lei Jun ($44.9 billion), Colin Huang ($43.2 billion), Tencent co-founder and CEO Ma Huateng ($56.6 billion), and Zhong Shanshan ($54.1 billion), the founder of Nongfu Spring.

Although Zhang was successful in creating a platform that gave rise to a new generation of social media celebrities, he is regarded as a very private person and resigned as CEO of ByteDance in 2021 after almost ten years in that position.

Named after a Chinese proverb that means "surprising everyone with a first attempt," Zhang Yiming was born in the Chinese province of Fujian in 1983. His parents were civil servants there.

According to the South China Morning Post, he graduated from Nankai University in 2005 after studying microelectronics and then switching to software engineering. He married his college sweetheart.

After that, he worked at Microsoft and Kuxun, a digital travel booking startup, before starting ByteDance in 2012, which operates the video messaging app Duoshan, WeChat competitor FlipChat, and TikTok.

Toutiao, a news aggregator app driven by artificial intelligence (AI), was ByteDance's debut offering.

When TikTok first launched in September 2016, it was known as Douyin. As of September 2024, it had more than 170 million users in the US alone, making it one of the most widely used social networks worldwide.

However, its Chinese ownership raised concerns among US regulators, prompting the Senate to pass a divest-or-ban law on TikTok in April of last year, requiring it to cease US operations on January 19 if ByteDance did not divest its stake.

However, newly elected US President Donald Trump issued an executive order on January 20 that suspended the ban for 75 days. This means that TikTok has until April 5 to find a new owner in the US, for which Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and "Shark Tank" star Kevin O'Leary have expressed interest.