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

Zhang was born in 1983 in China's Fujian province.

Zhang's parents worked as civil servants, according to Bloomberg.

His name is based on a Chinese proverb about "surprising everyone with a first attempt," the South China Morning Post reported.

He married his college sweetheart.

Zhang graduated from Nankai University in 2005, where he started off studying microelectronics before switching his major to software engineering, according to the South China Morning Post.

Zhang's first job out of college was at a digital travel booking startup called Kuxun.

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 founded TikTok's parent company in 2012.

The company owns several social networking apps that operate within China. It released a WeChat rival called FlipChat, and a video-messaging app called Duoshan in 2019.

Zhang and ByteDance's first product was a news aggregator app called Toutiao.

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."

Zhang launched ByteDance's most successful app — TikTok — under the name Douyin in September 2016.

TikTok is one of the most popular social networks among American teens and has more than 170 million US users as of September 2024, the company says.

Zhang was known for making his own TikToks — and requiring his senior employees to do so as well.

"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.

Zhang stepped down as ByteDance's CEO in 2021.

Zhang stepped down as CEO in 2021, saying that he "lack[s] some of the skills that make an ideal manager" and would be a greater asset to the company in a non-management role.

Zhang wants the app to continue to grow abroad, saying that he hopes his ByteDance will be "as borderless as Google," according to the South China Morning Post.

"We must work harder, we must also be more perfectionist," Zhang said, according to SCMP. "Just like there was an international division of labour in the industrial age, in today's information age there's also an international division of labour. Chinese entrepreneurs must also improve their own capabilities as they go global," he said.

However, TikTok's ownership by a Chinese parent company and its growing influence in the US has raised concerns among US regulators.

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.

Zhang has become a billionaire owing to the success of TikTok and ByteDance more broadly.

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.