Meet Zhang Yiming, the extremely private billionaire behind TikTok who is now China’s richest person

Zhang said he was an engineer at first but came to be in charge of 40 to 50 people by his second year at the company, according to SCMP. He credits that job with teaching him sales skills that he later used to grow ByteDance, including learning “what sales are good sales.”

Zhang learned the value of pursuing excellence while still in his first job at Kuxun, he told ByteDance employees, according to the report.

“At that time, I was responsible for the technology, but when the product had problems, and I would actively participate in the discussion of [the] product plan,” Zhang said, according to the newspaper. “A lot of people say this is not what I should be doing. But I want to say: your sense of responsibility and your desire to do things well, will drive you to do more things and to gain experience.”

Zhang also worked at Microsoft before founding ByteDance, the South China Morning Post reported.

Zhang wanted to create a news platform whose results were powered by artificial intelligence, separate from China’s search engine Baidu.

“We push information, not by queries, by news recommendations,” Zhang told Bloomberg in 2017.

Despite its focus on news, Zhang told Bloomberg’s Lulu Yilun Chen and Mark Bergen in 2017 that ByteDance does not have any journalists on its staff like many other social networks.

“The most important thing is that we are not a news business,” Zhang told Bloomberg. “We are more like a search business or a social media platform. We are doing very innovative work. We are not a copycat of a U.S. company, both in product and technology.”

“For a very long time, I was merely watching TikTok videos without making any of them myself, because it’s a product mainly for young people,” Zhang said, according to the South China Morning Post. “But later on we made it compulsory for all management team members to make their own TikTok videos, and they must win a certain number of ‘likes’. Otherwise, they have to do push-ups. It was a big step for me.”

Zhang’s leadership style is “soft-spoken yet charismatic, logical yet passionate, young yet wise,” according to Time Magazine’s Kai-Fu Lee.

TikTok is currently fighting a law that would require it to find a new owner in the US by a January 19, 2025, deadline or be banned in the country.

Forbes first declared Zhang a billionaire in March 2018, estimating that Zhang was worth $4 billion.

On the annual Hurun China Rich List for 2024, he was listed as the country’s richest person, with an estimated net worth of $49.3 billion.