TikTok tycoon Zhang Yiming now calls Singapore home – as do many Chinese tech titans these days

Billionaire ByteDance Ltd. founder Zhang Yiming is living in Singapore while keeping Chinese citizenship, court filings recently revealed
He joins a raft of corporate chieftains who relocated to the city state from China after years of regulatory tightening and Covid restrictions

Singapore

Bloomberg

Published: 2:08pm, 8 May 2024

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Among the facts TikTok’s lawsuit against the US government surfaced: billionaire ByteDance Ltd. founder Zhang Yiming is living in Singapore while keeping Chinese citizenship.

Zhang joins a raft of corporate chieftains who’ve relocated to the island state after years of regulatory tightening and Covid restrictions hammered China’s once freewheeling tech sector. Fellow entrepreneurs with close ties to the Asian financial hub include Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. CEO Eddie Wu – who is a naturalised Singaporean citizen – and cryptocurrency pioneer Wu Jihan. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming pictured at the company’s Beijing headquarters in 2017. Photo: Bloomberg

Zhang is a Chinese national living in Singapore who now owns roughly 21 per cent of TikTok’s parent, ByteDance said in its lawsuit challenging the TikTok divest-or-ban law. Global investors and ByteDance employees own the rest.

The billionaire spent much of 2022 overseas, using Singapore as a primary base, The Information reported at the time, fuelling speculation he had applied for foreign citizenship. TikTok included Zhang’s status in a section outlining influential figures at the company.

Like many of China’s corporate elite, several of ByteDance’s honchos have shown a predilection for the prosperous city state in past years.

Zhang years ago handed leadership at ByteDance to fellow co-founder and college roommate Liang Rubo, who is now also based in Singapore. TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi himself is Singaporean. Other senior executives for ByteDance’s Chinese operations, including commercialisation chief Zhang Lidong, remain in their home country.

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Zhang’s 21 per cent slice of ByteDance is worth more than US$40 billion, based on the company’s US$268 billion valuation during a recent share buy-back programme. The filing also shows Zhang has held onto his shares over the past year, since TikTok’s CEO revealed his boss’s stake of around 20 per cent during a Congressional hearing.

Zhang’s current status emerged after TikTok filed a lawsuit against legislation requiring ByteDance to hive off its most successful global invention. The bill sailed through Congress and US President Joe Biden signed it into law in April, beginning a 270-day countdown for a sale or a US prohibition of the popular video-sharing platform.

The lawsuit affirms expectations that ByteDance doesn’t intend to find a buyer for TikTok as the deadline approaches. Instead, the Chinese firm wants the law declared unconstitutional, saying it violates the First Amendment.