Tikok founder Zhang now leads China’s Reichenlist-Diepresse.com

Zhang Yiming, the founder of the Tikok owner bytedance, has become China’s richest person for the first time. With a fortune of $ 57.5 billion, Zhang Yiming led the list yesterday, Wednesday, and the bottle water magnate Zhong Shanshan and the co-founder of TencentMa Huateng, outdated. The tech-tycoon became number one after Zhong’s assets had decreased by a decline in profits at his Nongfu Spring. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zhang is now the most third -party person of Asia after the Indians Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani.

Remarkable turn

Zhang’s assets have increased by more than $ 10 billion after Bloomberg analyzed the ratings of investors Blackrock, Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price, as well as the company’s plans to buy employee shares with an evaluation of $ 312 billion. The average of the four was $ 365 billion. For the 41-year-old, this is a remarkable turn after a turbulent time in which a ban on Tiktokthe bytedance blockbuster app was threatened in the USA and the world’s largest record label at times moved out its music from the social media platform.

What’s next with TikTok in the USA?

The fate of Tiktok in the USA remains unclear. President Donald Trump granted BYTEDACE a 75-day extension of the deadline until April 5 in order to find a buyer for his US activities or to obtain a ban. Oracle is considering a proposal for the sale of the US business of TikKOK, in which the company would hand over security guarantees and take over a small participation in a new American company, while the app’s influential algorithm may remain in Chinese hands, as Bloomberg News reports. Trump said on Wednesday that he would consider reducing the tariffs imposed against China to gain Beijing’s support for the sale of Tikok’s US business to an American company. The President predicted that he would be able to secure at least the basic features of a Tikok business by next week, but he said that he would extend the deadline if an agreement would not be concluded.

In China, Bytedance is one of the leading companies in the field of artificial intelligence. His Ki-Chatbot Doubao has 75 million active users, and the company advertises that its former model for understanding visions is 85 percent cheaper than the average price in the industry, similar to Deepseek. « Zhang differs from the earlier generations of billionaires ‘Made in China’ because his company is hosted more innovative and global, » said Hao Gao, director of the Research Center for Global Family Business at Tsinghua University.

Career of Zhang

Zhang, a Chinese citizen who lives in Singapore, has built up his wealth exclusively through his 21 percent participation in Bytedance, whose TikTok has more than a billion users. Zhang began his career as an engineer on the tourism search page Kuxun.com. In 2009 he founded his first company, a real estate search page called 99fang.com. He quit three years later.

In 2012, Zhang founded a small apartment in Beijing Bytedance and started the Toutiao news app, which attracted more than 13 million daily users within two years. Zhang wanted to create a AI-based platform that differs from China’s established Baidu search engine. « The most important thing is that we are not a news company, » said Zhang 2017 in an interview. « We are more of a search company or a social media platform. We do very innovative work. We are not a imitator of a US company, both for products and technology. »

In 2016, Bytedance started his video sharing app TIKTOK, which is known locally as a douyin, with a small fan base. The product was an immediate hit in Generation Z and Millennials and became popular worldwide in the following years. Bytedance bought Musical.ly, a Chinese social media service, two years later for around $ 800 million and integrated it into Tiktok. By developing a series of successful apps, the company has developed into a multifaceted empire that includes videos and a variety of platforms for all sorts of things, from jokes to celebrity gossip. In 2021 Zhang resigned as CEO, and a few months later he also gave the chair. Many of his billionaire colleagues, including Jack Ma from Alibaba and Colin Huang, the founder of PDD have also given active roles in their companies. (Bloomberg)