Surpassing Adani, TikTok Founder Zhang Yiming Becomes Asia’s Richest Person

 Surpassing Adani, TikTok Founder Zhang Yiming Becomes Asia’s Richest Person

Zhang Yiming, co-founder of ByteDance—the parent company of the short-video platform TikTok—has become the richest person in Asia. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, 43-year-old Zhang has overtaken Indian industrialist Gautam Adani to claim the top spot among Asia’s wealthiest individuals for the first time.

Driven by rapid growth and investments in artificial intelligence (AI) technology, his total net worth has surpassed $105 billion. When Bloomberg first calculated his wealth in March 2019, his net worth stood at just $13 billion; it has since grown nearly eightfold.

In the current month alone, Zhang’s wealth increased by more than $12 billion after major investors—including BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, and T. Rowe Price—raised their valuation of shares held in ByteDance.

Previously, in June, Zhang had moved into the second position—surpassing another Indian billionaire, Mukesh Ambani—after Bloomberg adjusted the risk discount applied to ByteDance, lowering it from 25 percent to 10 percent.

This achievement by Zhang follows the successful navigation of a significant threat: the potential ban of TikTok in the United States. Although TikTok faced the prospect of being shut down in the U.S. last year, control of its American operations was transferred this past January to a new venture led by Oracle and Silver Lake. Since then, ByteDance has aggressively ramped up its investment in AI technology. This includes the development of the Doubao chatbot, the Seedance AI video generator, and the training of a new AI model featuring 10 trillion parameters.

Lian Jye Su, a principal analyst at the research firm Omdia, noted that Zhang has adopted the right strategy by consistently doubling down on investments in the AI ​​sector. Su highlighted that ByteDance’s vast repository of social media data presents a major opportunity for training AI models, while intense competition within China remains a primary challenge.

Meanwhile, a decline in the wealth of Indian industrialist Gautam Adani has also paved the way for Zhang to reach the top spot. Adani’s net worth, which stood at approximately $120 billion last June, saw a $15 billion drop in the market value of his conglomerate by the end of August, following a review of the MSCI index. Furthermore, a downturn in the stock market—driven by rising crude oil prices and increased bond yields—pushed Adani’s share prices even lower.

Zhang has surpassed not only Adani and Ambani but also Tadashi Yanai, the founder of Uniqlo. However, because ByteDance is a private company and its shares are not publicly traded, estimates of Zhang’s net worth vary across different indices.

Forbes’ real-time list estimates Zhang’s net worth at $84 billion, whereas Bloomberg’s valuation incorporates a 10 percent risk discount for ByteDance. Zhang, China's richest person, has become the wealthiest individual in all of Asia, even as the Chinese government defends its ambitions in the field of AI.