Zhang Yiming, who founded ByteDance, has moved to the top of Asia’s wealth rankings with a fortune valued at 105.5 billion dollars. The milestone lifts the notably private Chinese entrepreneur above Indian industrialist Gautam Adani, who had held the region’s leading position. Much of Zhang’s climb has come over a matter of weeks rather than years. Zhang founded ByteDance in 2012 and built it into one of the world’s most valuable privately held technology companies.
His net worth rose by around 12 billion dollars in September alone and has grown by roughly 92 billion since 2019. The latest surge came after large asset managers, among them BlackRock and Fidelity, raised their estimates of what the privately held ByteDance is worth. Zhang owns close to 21 percent of the company, so any change in its valuation moves his personal fortune sharply. That concentrated stake has made him one of the largest beneficiaries of the recent run-up in the value of firms tied to artificial intelligence.
ByteDance is the parent of TikTok and its Chinese sibling Douyin, two of the most heavily used short video services in the world, with TikTok alone counting more than a billion daily active users. Because the company has stayed private, its value is fixed through periodic assessments and internal share transactions rather than a share price set on a public exchange. ByteDance is based in Beijing and has so far resisted pressure to list its shares.
Analysts tie much of the increase to the company’s drive into artificial intelligence. ByteDance draws on the enormous flow of data generated by TikTok and Douyin to train advanced AI models, a resource that has become one of its most prized assets and has reshaped how investors judge its longer-term prospects.
“He plays his cards right,” said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at the research firm Omdia. “He stayed on course and then continued to double down on AI investment.” Zhang handed over the chief executive role in 2021 and stepped away from the daily running of ByteDance but kept his large ownership stake. His rise to the head of Asia’s wealth tables underscores how the contest to build AI is redrawing the map of the world’s biggest fortunes.
