TikTok’s wild popularity has helped Zhang Yiming, the 41-year-old cofounder of the social network’s parent company ByteDance, become China’s richest person.
According to Hurun Research Institute’s Hurun China Rich List 2024 released Tuesday, Zhang sits atop the list of the country’s wealthiest people for the first time with a reported net wealth of $49.3 billion. He is the 18th person to hold the superlative of China’s richest man since 1999, the year the list was founded. The tech founder usurped Zhong Shanshan, founder of bottled water giant Nongfu Spring, from the top of the list, a spot he held for three years.
ByteDance, which also owns news platform Toutiao and TikTok’s Chinese sister app Douyin, is estimated to have a valuation topping $225 billion, having brought in $110 billion in revenue last year. TikTok alone is responsible for about $100 billion of the company’s value, according to Wedbush Securities, and it’s no wonder why. Beyond its algorithm—which Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said has doubled or tripled the app’s worth—TikTok has topped 150 million monthly active users (MAUs) in 2023 and is estimated to have over 1 billion global MAUs, according to DemandSage.
TikTok’s popularity persists in the face of a potential U.S. ban for continuing to refuse to sell itself to a non-Chinese owner by Jan. 19. The U.S. government warned ByteDance it is a potential national-security risk and that China had the potential to access American users’ data. Zhang stepped down as ByteDance CEO in 2021, but still owns about 20% of the company.
TikTok isn’t the only Chinese behemoth under threat. The total wealth measured on the Hurun China Rich List this year amounted to $3 trillion, a 10% dip from last year. The number of billionaires on the list, as measured in U.S. dollars, dropped from 1,185 in 2021 to 753 this year amid mounting fears of the slowing long-term growth of China’s economy.
Zhang’s big break
Zhang spent his college years in Tianjin’s Nankai University in Tianjin, building websites and fixing students’ computers as a way to earn some extra cash. He worked odd jobs, like building a search engine for airfare tickets and a microblogging platform, before he joined Microsoft, a post he held for only six months.
“During my time at Microsoft, I basically read books for half a day and worked for half a day,” Zhang said in a 2014 interview with Caishi Media's Super Talk, which was translated from Chinese to English. “There were not many challenging things to do. Most of the time, I was quite idle.”
Zhang founded ByteDance in 2012 in a four-bedroom Beijing apartment, and by 2014, the company’s news aggregator Toutiao had 220 million users, including 20 million daily users. Two years after that, ByteDance introduced TikTok, which became a worldwide hit during the pandemic. The video-streaming app had over 3 billion downloads by 2022, according to DemandSage.
By the time Zhang stepped down as ByteDance’s CEO in 2021, he was receiving pressure from Beijing, which was tightening its hold on its tech sector, anxious that the industry had amassed too much power and influence from its growing cadre of billionaire elites.
ByteDance’s uncertain future in the U.S. appears to mirror China’s apprehension. In a 2017 interview translated into English, Zhang seemed prescient about the risk of expanding his fledgling TikTok into a global tech brand.
“If [and] when Chinese companies go overseas, they can overcome cultural problems,” he said. “Will the overseas market be huge? I am both optimistic and pessimistic about this.”
ByteDance did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
