Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, is ranked No. 26 on the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list with a net worth of $69.3 billion. ByteDance owns TikTok and its Chinese counterpart, Douyin.
Zhang Yiming was born on April 1, 1983, in Longyan, Fujian, China, the only son of civil servants. He enrolled at Nankai University in Tianjin in 2001 and graduated in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, where he met his wife.
Net Worth and Rank
- Forbes 2026 list: No. 26, with $69.3 billion
- Later estimate: Bloomberg put his wealth at $105 billion as of September 2026, according to Wikipedia; he was the first Chinese centibillionaire and the richest man in China in 2024
Early Career
In 2006 Zhang became the fifth employee and first engineer at the travel website Kuxun. In 2008 he briefly joined Microsoft, then moved to the startup Fanfou, which failed. In 2009 he took over Kuxun’s real-estate search business and started 99fang.com, his first company, which he left three years later.
Founding ByteDance
- The idea: he thought Chinese smartphone users struggled to find information in apps, and wanted to use AI recommendations to deliver relevant content
- March 2012: he founded ByteDance with Liang Rubo in a four-bedroom apartment
- August 2012: the Toutiao news app launched, and within two years it had more than 13 million daily users
- 2014: Sequoia Capital, which had at first rejected him, led a $100 million investment
- Global push: ByteDance developed the video platform Douyin, known outside China as TikTok
Stepping Down
In May 2021 Zhang said he would step down as CEO and be succeeded by Liang Rubo. The handover was completed on November 4, 2021. According to Reuters, he keeps over 50% of ByteDance’s voting rights.
Why It Matters
TikTok’s global popularity drove ByteDance’s value, and Zhang’s fortune follows the value of the private company.
Net worth figures change daily with share prices. Rankings here follow the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, with wealth measured on March 1, 2026.
Image: A ByteDance office building in Beijing, March 2024 (file photo; Zhang Yiming is not pictured). Photo: N509FZ / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
