TikTok founder Zhang Yiming is one of the world’s richest people catching up to Tencent’s Pony Ma and bottled water king Zhong Shanshan – but is his US$60 billion fortune drawing unwanted attention?

Apr 16 , 2021

Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance amd multibillionaire. Photo: Bloomberg

ByteDance, famous for its video apps and news platform Toutiao, expanded into e-commerce and online gaming – and was targeted by the Trump administration

Beijing has also cracked down on Chinese tech companies, fining the Jack Ma-led Alibaba US$2.8 billion and overhauling fintech company Ant Group Co.

Just last year, the world’s most valuable start-up, ByteDance Ltd., was being squeezed from all sides.

The Trump administration wanted the Chinese firm, which owns the ubiquitous TikTok video-sharing platform, to shed some of its assets. Beijing was cracking down on tech businesses, and India blacklisted some of its social-media apps.

TikTok logos on smartphones in front of a ByteDance logo. Photo: Photo: Reuters

For all the obstacles, ByteDance kept growing. Now its founder, 38-year-old Zhang Yiming, is among the world’s richest people – a distinction that lately has itself carried increased risks in China.

Shares in the company are trading on the private market at prices that value the company at more than US$250 billion. At that level, Zhang, who owns about a quarter of ByteDance, could be worth more than US$60 billion, placing him around Tencent Holdings Ltd’s Pony Ma, bottled water king Zhong Shanshan and members of the Walton and Koch families in the US, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. At the time of writing, his known fortune is around US$44.5 billion.

ByteDance, famous for its short-video apps and news aggregator Toutiao, more than doubled its revenue last year after expanding beyond its core advertising business into areas such as e-commerce and online gaming. It’s now weighing options for the initial public offering (IPO) of some businesses.

“Zhang is someone who’s known for thinking long-term and not easily dissuaded by short-term setbacks,” said Ma Rui, partner at venture-capital firm Synaptic Ventures. “He is set on building an enduring, global business.”

Surging valuation