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.
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.”
