TikTok boss becomes China's richest man

TikTok owner is China's richest, third in Asia

The TikTok owner has overtaken bottled water tycoon Zhong Shanshan and Tencent Holdings co-founder Ma Huateng to top the list with a fortune of $57.5 billion. The tech tycoon is now Asia's third-richest person, behind India's Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

TikTok owner Zhang Yiming becomes China's richest person for the first time.

Zhang’s fortune soared more than $10 billion after Bloomberg analyzed valuations from investors including BlackRock Inc., Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price Group Inc., along with ByteDance’s employee stock buyback plan, valuing the company at $312 billion. The average of the four estimates was $365 billion. For the 41-year-old, it’s a stunning turnaround after a tumultuous period that included threats to ban TikTok in the U.S. — ByteDance’s hit app — and the world’s largest record label temporarily pulling music from the social media platform.

TikTok’s future in the U.S. remains unclear. President Donald Trump has given ByteDance 75 days — until April 5 — to find a buyer for its U.S. operations or face a ban. According to Bloomberg News, Oracle Corp. is considering a proposal to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations that would provide security guarantees and take a minority stake in a new U.S. entity, potentially leaving the app’s key algorithm in Chinese hands.

President Donald Trump said yesterday that he would consider reducing tariffs on China in exchange for Beijing’s support for the sale of TikTok in the United States to an American company. He predicted that at least the outlines of a deal could be reached next week, but if not completed, he would extend the deadline.

In China, ByteDance is one of the leaders in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry. Its AI chatbot Doubao has 75 million active users, while the company touts its previous visual understanding model as 85% cheaper than the industry average, similar to DeepSeek.

House in Singapore

"Zhang is different from previous generations of 'made in China' billionaires because his businesses are more innovative and globally oriented," said Hao Gao, director of the Global Family Business Research Center at Tsinghua University.

The TikTok app now has more than 1 billion users.

Zhang, a Chinese citizen living in Singapore, built his entire fortune from a 21% stake in ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, which has more than 1 billion users.

Zhang started his career as an engineer at travel search site Kuxun.com. In 2009, he started his first venture, 99fang.com, a real estate search site, but quit after three years. In 2012, Zhang founded ByteDance in a small apartment in Beijing, launching the news app Toutiao and attracting more than 13 million daily users in just two years. Zhang wanted to create an AI-based platform that would differentiate itself from China’s traditional search engine, Baidu.

“The most important thing is that we are not a news business. We are more like a search business or a social media platform. We are doing very innovative work, not a copy of an American company, both in terms of products and technology,” Mr. Zhang said in a 2017 interview.

In 2016, ByteDance launched the video-sharing app TikTok, known locally as Douyin, with a modest initial following. The product quickly became a hit with Gen Z and millennials, gaining global popularity in the years that followed. Two years later, ByteDance bought Musical.ly, a Chinese social networking service, for about $800 million and integrated it into TikTok. By nurturing a series of successful apps, the company has grown into a diverse empire, from videos to countless platforms for everything from jokes to celebrity gossip.

In 2021, Zhang stepped down as CEO, then a few months later as chairman. Several other billionaires, including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Jack Ma and PDD Holdings Inc.’s Colin Huang, have also stepped down from executive roles at their companies.

Zhang Yiming was born in Longyan City, Fujian Province, China, in April 1982. He attended Nankai University in Tianjin in 2001, majoring in microelectronics before switching to software engineering. Zhang started as a regular engineer, but by his second year he was managing 40 to 50 employees in charge of back-end technology and other product-related tasks.

The skills Zhang developed at Kuxun helped the billionaire learn the basics of a startup, before transforming from a young entrepreneur into one of the top leaders of the decade.

Zhang left Kuxun in 2008 to work for Microsoft, but felt constrained by the company's business standards. He soon left Microsoft to work for the failing startup Fanfou.

Zhang founded his first company, 99fang.com, a real estate search portal, in 2009. He left the company three years later, but the business inspired Zhang to become an entrepreneur and China's richest billionaire.

Source: https://www.baogiaothong.vn/ong-chu-tiktok-tro-thanh-nguoi-giau-nhat-trung-quoc-192250327194345184.htm