Meet Shou Zi Chew, TikTok's 40-year-old CEO who's entered the spotlight as he tries to defend the company from growing security concerns and ban threats

Chew worked for Facebook when it was still a startup.

He earned his bachelor's degree in economics at the University College London before heading to Harvard Business School for his MBA in 2010. 

While a student there, Chew worked for a startup that "was called Facebook," he said in a post on Harvard's Alumni website. Facebook went public in mid-2012.

 

Chew met his now-wife, Vivian Kao, via email when they were both students at Harvard.

They are "a couple who often finish each other's sentences," according to the school's alumni page, and have two kids.

Chew was CFO of Xiaomi before joining Bytedance.

He became chief financial officer of the Chinese smartphone giant, which competes with Apple, in 2015. Chew helped secure crucial financing and led the company through its 2018 public listing, which would become one of the nation's largest tech IPOs in history. 

He became Xiaomi's international business president in 2019, too.

Before joining Xiaomi, Chew also worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs for two years, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He also worked at investment firm DST, founded by Israeli-Russian IT billionaire Yuri Milner, for five years. It was during his time there in 2013 that he led a team that became early investors in Bytedance, as the Business Chief and The Independent reported.

For a while, Chew was both the CEO of TikTok and the CFO of its parent company, ByteDance.

Chew joined ByteDance's C-suite first in March 2021, the first person to fill the role of chief financial officer at the media giant.

He was named CEO of TikTok that May at the same time as Vanessa Pappas was named COO. Bytedance founder and CEO Zhang Yiming said at the time that Chew "brings deep knowledge of the company and industry, having led a team that was among our earliest investors, and having worked in the technology sector for a decade."

That November, it was announced that Chew would leave his role as ByteDance's CFO to focus on running TikTok.

TikTok's former CEO, Kevin Mayer, had left Walt Disney for the position in May 2020 and quit after three months as the company faced pressure from lawmakers over security risks.

Some government officials in the US and other countries remain concerned that TikTok's user data could be shared with the Chinese Communist Party.

Former President Donald Trump's administration issued executive orders designed to force ByteDance into divesting its TikTok US operations, though nothing ever happened; President Joe Biden signed an executive order in June 2021 that threw out Trump's proposed bans on the app.

Fast forward to this month, and the Biden administration is demanding TikTok divest its American business from its Chinese parent company, or else risk being banned in the US. In response, Chew said such a divestment wouldn't solve officials' security concerns surrounding TikTok. 

In a TikTok this week, Chew announced the company has amassed 150 million monthly active users in the US and broached the subject of the ban threats.

"Some politicians have started talking about banning TikTok," he said. "Now this could take TikTok away from all 150 million of you."

Chew will testify before Congress on Thursday about the company's privacy and data security practices.