ByteDance co-founder Zhang Yiming, in a portrait released by the company in 2021. Credit: ByteDance ByteDance co-founder Zhang Yiming is now Asia’s richest person, with an estimated fortune of more than $105bn, putting him ahead of Indian industrialist Gautam Adani, according to Bloomberg. The ranking comes from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and Zhang, 43, has never held the top spot before. The figure is an estimate, and other trackers disagree.
Forbes’ real-time list put Zhang’s net worth at $84bn on Wednesday. The gap comes largely from how each list values ByteDance, a private company whose shares do not trade publicly. Bloomberg applies a 10% risk discount to its valuation. Investor valuations drove the latest jump.
Zhang’s wealth rose by more than $12bn this month after Bloomberg analyzed the latest marks that BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, and T. Rowe Price put on their ByteDance holdings. In June, the index had already lifted him past Mukesh Ambani into second place, after Bloomberg cut its ByteDance discount from 25% once the company’s US restructuring was settled. That restructuring nearly went the other way.
ByteDance spent much of last year facing a possible US shutdown of TikTok, before handing control of the app’s American business to a venture led by Oracle and Silver Lake in January. Since then, the company has leaned harder into AI, with the Doubao chatbot and the Seedance video generator, alongside a 10-trillion-parameter model now in training. “He plays his cards right,” Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at research firm Omdia, told Bloomberg.“He stayed on course and then continued to double down on AI investment.” Su said Zhang kept backing AI development even as US lawmakers questioned TikTok chief executive Shou Chew in 2023, and that ByteDance’s store of social media data could in theory help it train models. He called AI ByteDance’s biggest opportunity since its video platform, and fierce competition in China its biggest risk. Adani’s slide explains the other half of the swap.
His fortune peaked at about $120bn in June, Bloomberg reported, before an MSCI index rebalancing wiped about $15bn off his group’s market value at the end of August. A wider selloff, driven by rising oil prices and bond yields, pushed the shares lower still. Zhang’s estimated wealth has grown about eightfold since March 2019, when Bloomberg first valued it at $13bn. He was already China’s richest person, and he now sits above Adani, Ambani, and Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai, fortunes built on ports, energy, and retail.
The same boom has also made founders of Chinese chipmakers billionaires, even though those companies have yet to turn a profit, Bloomberg reported last week. The ranking lands in a week when Beijing has been publicly defending its AI ambitions. China’s commerce ministry dismissed calls by US AI executives to slow frontier development as a bid for technological hegemony, and China’s richest person, whose fortune increasingly rests on AI, is now also Asia’s richest person.
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