Tiktok Founder Zhang Yiming Is Now China's Richest Person. All About Him



Zhang Yiming, the founding father of TikTok's discerning employer ByteDance, is now the richest man or woman in china, with an internet worth of $57.5 billion.


The 41-year-old antique software engineer's wealth rose by using $13.6 year-to-date, consistent with the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, additionally making him the 24th richest person in the globe.


Amongst China's pinnacle five richest, Zhang is trailed by Tencent co-founder and CEO Ma Huateng ($56.6 billion), Nongfu Spring founder Zhong Shanshan ($54.1 billion), xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun ($44.9 billion), and Pinduoduo founder and former CEO Colin Huang ($43.2 billion).


Meanwhile, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, as soon as China's richest, has fallen into sixth place with a net worth of $39.6 billion.


No matter Zhang's success in founding a platform that created a brand new era of social media stars, he's known to be a fantastically private man or woman, stepping down as ByteDance's CEO in 2021 after running it for nearly a decade.


He reportedly informed his employees that he's "no longer very social, preferring solitary sports like being online, analyzing, paying attention to track, and deliberating what can be viable" and that he lacked "some of the capabilities that make a great supervisor," preferring a non-managerial function, in keeping with a 2021 document with the aid of information enterprise Reuters.


Zhang Yiming, whose call is based totally on a Chinese language proverb approximately "unexpected all and sundry with a first attempt," was born in 1983 in China's Fujian province, with his parents having worked as civil servants.


He graduated from Nankai university in 2005, wherein he first of all studied microelectronics before switching to software program engineering, in keeping with a South china Morning Post document. He additionally married his college sweetheart.


He then worked in places together with a wallet PLATFORM' target='_blank' title='digital-Latest Updates, Photos, Videos are a click away, CLICK NOW'>digital travel booking startup referred to as Kuxun and microsoft before founding ByteDance in 2012, which operates not only TikTok but also WeChat rival FlipChat and video-messaging app Duoshan.


However, ByteDance's first product was the synthetic intelligence (AI)-powered news aggregator app Toutiao.


TikTok, in itself, was released in september 2016 to begin with under the name Douyin. It then went directly to become one of the most popular social networks globally, with more than one hundred seventy million users in the US on my own as of september 2024.


But its Chinese language possession raised concerns amongst US regulators, with the Senate passing a divest-or-ban law on TikTok in the final year, requiring it to stop US operations on january 19 if ByteDance no longer divested its stake.


However, the newly elected US President, Donald Trump, signed a government order on january 20, pausing the ban for 75 days. That means that unless the rule changes, TikTok has till april 5 to find a new proprietor within the US, for which the likes of Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and "Shark Tank" famous person Kevin O'Leary have expressed interest.




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