Who is Zhang Yiming, China’s richest man?

He owns a 20% share in ByteDance—a private company that, according to Fortune magazine, brought in over $110 billion in revenue last year.

The company is valued at more than $225 billion, with TikTok alone estimated to be worth $100 billion, according to U.S.-based brokerage Wedbush Securities.

The tech billionaire’s success was not achieved overnight and his journey has been marked with many ups and downs.

Zhang Yiming, founder and CEO of tech company Bytedance, attends a meeting in Fuzhou city, southeast China's Fujian province, 18 June 2016. Photo by Reuters

Zhang Yiming, whose name is derived from a Chinese proverb that translates to surprising everyone with a first attempt, was born in 1983 to civil servant parents, according to Bloomberg.

Raised in Longyan, a city in China’s southwestern Fujian Province, he graduated from Nankai University in 2005, where he initially studied microelectronics before switching his major to software engineering.

While in university, he earned extra money by building websites and repairing students' computers, which is also how he met his wife.

Zhang's first job after college was at Kuxun, a digital travel booking startup, where he began as a software engineer and, by his second year, had risen to lead a team of 40 to 50 people responsible for back-end technology and product-related tasks.

He credited his rapid rise to a strong work ethic, often going beyond his job description by actively engaging in product planning discussions when issues arose.

"Your sense of responsibility and your desire to do things well will drive you to do more things and to gain experience," he said of his time at Kuxun.

He later worked at Microsoft for six months before switching to Fanfou, a Twitter-like startup that eventually failed.

His job at Microsoft did not involve many challenging tasks, he said in a 2014 interview with Caishi Media, adding that he worked only half a day and spent the rest reading books.

Driven by a deep interest in information flow, Zhang conceived the idea of an app that would distribute content tailored to personal interests by late 2011.

The following year, he founded ByteDance in a modest four-bedroom apartment in northern Beijing, which he rented for 20,000 yuan (US$2,780) per month.

The company’s first product was Toutiao, a news aggregator app powered by artificial intelligence, which Zhang envisioned as a platform for personalized news. By 2014, the app had grown to 220 million users, including 20 million daily users.

ByteDance’s transformation into a giant started with Toutiao, but its success is more closely linked to a series of strategic acquisitions and expansions that pushed the company into mobile video and international markets.

In September 2016, it launched Douyin, an app that allows users to record and edit videos, apply filters, and share them across major Chinese platforms like Weibo and WeChat.

This short video format quickly captivated millennials’ shorter attention spans, becoming so popular that WeChat eventually blocked direct access to it.

A year later, ByteDance introduced TikTok to the overseas market as the international counterpart to Douyin.

It skyrocketed in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic, reaching over three billion downloads by 2022 and surpassing one billion monthly active users worldwide this year, as estimated by business analytics firm DemandSage.

After nearly a decade at the helm of ByteDance, Zhang resigned from his role as CEO in 2021, reportedly explaining to employees that he is "not very social, preferring solitary activities like being online, reading, listening to music, and contemplating what may be possible," as reported by Business Insider.

He said at the time that he lacked some of the skills that make an ideal manager, noting that he could better support the company in a role that did not involve managing people directly.

During his time as the CEO, his employees would describe him as rational, pragmatic and sincere, with some adding that he was also energetic and ambitious.

"For me, he is not a remote boss, but rather an ordinary engineer. He is quite cute. He sometimes stutters, but it is better now. He is nice, approachable and sincere," one of them told the South China Morning Post.

Staff can view Zhang’s schedule via a productivity tool and book a meeting with him from 9 a.m. to midnight.

"I am not called boss in the company, neither are other executives because we advocate the spirit of equality and sincerity. The idea of classes will restrict innovation", Zhang said in a show by Chinese media Yicai.

He required all members of the management team, including himself, to create their own TikTok videos. They also had to reach a certain number of likes, or else they would have to do push-ups.

In an article for American magazine Time, Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Sinovation Ventures, a venture capital firm that manages Chinese high-tech assets, described Zhang’s leadership as "soft-spoken yet charismatic, logical yet passionate, young yet wise."

He is reported to be a very private person, and little is publicly known about his personal life.

After stepping down, the tech billionaire spent a substantial part of 2022 overseas, with Singapore as his main residence.

Hurun Research Institute, the Shanghai-based firm behind the Hurun China Rich List, noted that the new generation of entrepreneurs in China is much more international than their predecessors, highlighting Zhang as a notable figure in this shift.

For businesses looking to expand overseas like his firm, the TikTok tycoon advised that they focus on enhancing their capabilities.

"We must work harder, we must also be more perfectionist," he said when discussing the challenges of going global.

Regarding his own ambitions, he expressed a desire for his company’s Toutiao to become as "borderless" as Google. "Personally, I hope to do things that are interesting and meaningful to society."