TikTok Founder Zhang Yiming Becomes Asia's Richest Person With $105 Billion
Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance and TikTok, became Asia's richest person with a net worth surpassing $105 billion, overtaking Indian tycoon Gautam Adani amid a massive AI-driven wealth surge.
Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance—the Chinese company behind TikTok—has become Asia's richest person for the first time. Zhang's net worth, 43, is estimated at over $105 billion, after surging by more than $12 billion since the beginning of the month. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, his fortune has now surpassed that of Indian tycoon Gautam Adani, who controls the Port of Haifa.
This represents an eightfold increase compared to a fortune of $13 billion recorded in March 2019, when Bloomberg began tracking his wealth. Zhang was already the richest person in China, largely due to TikTok's immense popularity and ByteDance's expansion into artificial intelligence, which includes the popular AI chatbot Doubao and the video generator Seedance. The recent surge in his wealth illustrates the scale of new wealth generated by the AI boom.
The TikTok Agreement and US Operations
Meanwhile, in recent years TikTok faced the threat of a ban in the US, after a 2024 law required ByteDance to divest its control of its American operations. In January 2025 the app was even shut down briefly, but following Donald Trump's return to the White House, the law's enforcement was postponed. In January 2026, an agreement was finalized establishing a new American entity for TikTok, in which ByteDance retained a 19.9% stake, thereby removing the ban threat.
Zhang founded ByteDance in 2012, and early on the company gained fame thanks to the Toutiao news app, which relied on algorithms for personalized content matching. Later, the company expanded into short video: in 2016 it launched Douyin in China, and a year later the international version, TikTok. In 2017 ByteDance acquired Musical.ly, and in 2018 merged it into TikTok—a move that helped the app skyrocket in Western markets. Zhang stepped down as CEO of ByteDance in 2021, and was succeeded by Liang Rubo, his co-founder.
"Zhang is playing his cards right," said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at research firm Omdia. "He maintained his direction, and subsequently continued to deepen investments in AI."
AI Investments and Market Shifts
According to Su, Zhang made a successful gamble by continuing to develop the company's artificial intelligence technologies even while the US Congress investigated TikTok CEO Shou Chew in 2023. He noted that ByteDance could also benefit from the massive dataset it accumulated from its social media operations to train artificial intelligence models.
Su stated that AI-related products and services are currently ByteDance's biggest opportunity following the success of its video platform, but fierce competition in the Chinese market is also its greatest risk. Meanwhile, Adani's fortune surged in June to about $120 billion, but shrank in recent months after a stock rebalancing in the MSCI index hit shares of his business empire. Broad market declines, driven by rising oil prices and bond yields, also weighed on the group's shares.
