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    Meet TikTok Billionaire Zhang Yiming, China’s Richest Man

    Press RoomBy No Comments7 Mins Read

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    • Zhang Yiming has built a $57.5 billion fortune since cofounding ByteDance, the Chinese tech giant behind TikTok.
    • Zhang is highly private and little is publicly known about his personal life.
    • He recently became the richest person in China. Here’s a look at his career and life.

    The widespread popularity of TikTok has created not only a new generation of social media stars — it’s also helped mint China’s wealthiest person.

    Zhang Yiming, the 41-year-old software engineer who founded the app’s parent company, ByteDance, now has a net worth of $57.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

    This makes Zhang the richest person in China, edging ahead of Pony Ma, the founder and CEO of Tencent. Ma has a net worth of $56.5 billion, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

    Zhang is a highly private person and little is publicly known about his personal life.

    After running ByteDance for nearly a decade, Zhang stepped down as CEO in 2021, reportedly telling employees that he’s “not very social, preferring solitary activities like being online, reading, listening to music, and contemplating what may be possible.”

    “The truth is, I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager,” Zhang said at the time, according to Reuters, saying he would be a better help to the company in a role that didn’t involve managing people directly.

    Here’s what we know about his career rise and life:

    Zhang was born in 1983 in China’s Fujian province.


    Zhang Yiming bytedance

    Zhang is 41 years old.


    VCG/VCG via Getty Images

    Zhang’s parents worked as civil servants, according to Bloomberg.

    His name is based on a Chinese proverb about “surprising everyone with a first attempt,” the South China Morning Post reported.

    He married his college sweetheart.


    TIANJIN, CHINA

    Nankai University is located in Tianjin, north China.


    Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images

    Zhang graduated from Nankai University in 2005, where he started off studying microelectronics before switching his major to software engineering, according to the South China Morning Post.

    Zhang’s first job out of college was at a digital travel booking startup called Kuxun.


    Yiming zhang bytedance

    Zhang says lessons he learned from his first job post-graduation helped him build ByteDance.

    Inspirasiku TV/YouTube


    Zhang said he was an engineer at first but came to be in charge of 40 to 50 people by his second year at the company, according to SCMP. He credits that job with teaching him sales skills that he later used to grow ByteDance, including learning “what sales are good sales.”

    Zhang learned the value of pursuing excellence while still in his first job at Kuxun, he told ByteDance employees, according to the report.

    “At that time, I was responsible for the technology, but when the product had problems, and I would actively participate in the discussion of [the] product plan,” Zhang said, according to the newspaper. “A lot of people say this is not what I should be doing. But I want to say: your sense of responsibility and your desire to do things well, will drive you to do more things and to gain experience.”

    Zhang also worked at Microsoft before founding ByteDance, the South China Morning Post reported.

    Zhang founded TikTok’s parent company in 2012.


    bytedance

    The headquarters of Beijing Bytedance Technology Co Ltd, in Beijing, China.


    Reuters/Stringer

    The company owns several social networking apps that operate within China. It released a WeChat rival called FlipChat, and a video-messaging app called Duoshan in 2019.

    Zhang and ByteDance’s first product was a news aggregator app called Toutiao.


    toutiao bytedance

    An ad for Bytedance’s news feed aggregator app Toutiao. Zhang is not pictured.


    Reuters/Stringer

    Zhang wanted to create a news platform whose results were powered by artificial intelligence, separate from China’s search engine Baidu.

    “We push information, not by queries, by news recommendations,” Zhang told Bloomberg in 2017.

    Despite its focus on news, Zhang told Bloomberg’s Lulu Yilun Chen and Mark Bergen in 2017 that ByteDance does not have any journalists on its staff like many other social networks.

    “The most important thing is that we are not a news business,” Zhang told Bloomberg. “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.”

    Zhang launched ByteDance’s most successful app — TikTok — under the name Douyin in September 2016.


    TikTok logo on a smart phone

    TikTok launched under the name Douyin.


    SOPA Images/Getty Images

    TikTok is one of the most popular social networks among American teens and has more than 170 million US users as of September 2024, the company says.

    Zhang was known for making his own TikToks — and requiring his senior employees to do so as well.


    Zhang Yiming, founder and global CEO of ByteDance

    Zhang said he required management to make their own TikToks and get a certain number of likes or else he’d ask them to do push-ups.


    VCG/Getty Images

    “For a very long time, I was merely watching TikTok videos without making any of them myself, because it’s a product mainly for young people,” Zhang said, according to the South China Morning Post. “But later on we made it compulsory for all management team members to make their own TikTok videos, and they must win a certain number of ‘likes’. Otherwise, they have to do push-ups. It was a big step for me.”

    Zhang’s leadership style is “soft-spoken yet charismatic, logical yet passionate, young yet wise,” according to Time Magazine’s Kai-Fu Lee.

    Zhang stepped down as ByteDance’s CEO in 2021.


    ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming.

    Zhang said he wanted TikTok to have global success.


    Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

    Zhang stepped down as CEO in 2021, saying that he “lack[s] some of the skills that make an ideal manager” and would be a greater asset to the company in a non-management role.

    Zhang wants the app to continue to grow abroad, saying that he hopes his ByteDance will be “as borderless as Google,” according to the South China Morning Post.

    “We must work harder, we must also be more perfectionist,” Zhang said, according to SCMP. “Just like there was an international division of labor in the industrial age, in today’s information age there’s also an international division of labor. Chinese entrepreneurs must also improve their own capabilities as they go global,” he said.

    However, TikTok’s ownership by a Chinese parent company and its growing influence in the US has raised concerns among US regulators.


    TikTok Congress

    The law requires that TikTok’s Chinese parent company divest from it, or else the app risks being banned in the US.


    Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images

    In April, the Senate passed a divest-or-ban law on TikTok, requiring the company to stop operations in the US on January 19 if it did not divest from ByteDance.

    However, the ban on TikTok was paused for 75 days after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on January 20. TikTok has until April 5 to find a new owner in the US.

    Several big-name buyers like Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, and “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary have expressed interest in acquiring TikTok.

    Zhang has become a billionaire owing to the success of TikTok and ByteDance more broadly.


    Zhang Yiming bytedance ceo

    Zhang Yiming is China’s richest person today.


    Visual China Group via Getty Images

    Forbes first declared Zhang a billionaire in March 2018, estimating that Zhang was worth $4 billion.

    On the annual Hurun China Rich List for 2024, he was listed as the country’s richest person, with an estimated net worth of $49.3 billion.

    In March, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index recognized Zhang as China’s richest person, with a net worth of $57.5 billion.

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