TikTok founder Zhang Yiming is now China's richest person. All about him
Zhang Yiming stepped down as ByteDance CEO in 2021 after running it for nearly a decade, claiming he preferred a non-managerial role.
Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok's parent company ByteDance, is now the richest person in China, with a net worth of $57.5 billion.
The 41-year-old software engineer's wealth rose by $13.6 year-to-date, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, also making him the 24th richest person in the world.
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Among China's top five richest, Zhang is trailed by Tencent co-founder and CEO Ma Huateng ($56.6 billion), Nongfu Spring founder Zhong Shanshan ($54.1 billion), Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun ($44.9 billion), and Pinduoduo founder and former CEO Colin Huang ($43.2 billion).
Meanwhile, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, once China's richest, has fallen into 6th place with a net worth of $39.6 billion.
Despite Zhang's success in founding a platform which created a new generation of social media stars, he is known to be a highly private person, stepping down as ByteDance's CEO in 2021 after running it for nearly a decade.
He reportedly told his employees that he's "not very social, preferring solitary activities like being online, reading, listening to music, and contemplating what may be possible" and that he lacked "some of the skills that make an ideal manager,” preferring a non-managerial role, according to a 2021 report by news agency Reuters.
Zhang Yiming, whose name is based on a Chinese proverb about “surprising everyone with a first attempt,” was born in 1983 in China's Fujian province, with his parents having worked as civil servants.
He graduated from Nankai University in 2005, where he initially studied microelectronics before switching to software engineering, according to a South China Morning Post report. He also married his college sweetheart.
He then worked in places such as a digital travel booking startup called Kuxun and Microsoft, before founding ByteDance in 2012, which operates not only TikTok, but also WeChat rival FlipChat and video-messaging app Duoshan.
However, ByteDance's first product was artificial intelligence (AI)-powered news aggregator app Toutiao.
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TikTok in itself, was launched in September 2016, initially under the name Douyin. It then went on to become one of the most popular social networks globally with more than 170 million users in the US alone as of September 2024.
However, its Chinese ownership raised concerns among US regulators, with the Senate passing a divest-or-ban law on TikTok in April last year, requiring it to stop US operations on January 19 if ByteDance did not divest its stake.
However, the newly elected US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on January 20, pausing the ban for 75 days, meaning that unless the rule changes, TikTok has till April 5 to find a new owner in the US, for which the likes of Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and "Shark Tank" star Kevin O'Leary have expressed interest.
