Zhang Yiming

Zhang Yiming (Chinese: 张一鸣; born 1 April 1983) is a Chinese Internet entrepreneur. He founded ByteDance in 2012, developed the news aggregator Toutiao and the video sharing platform Douyin (internationally known as TikTok). Zhang is one of the richest individuals in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$105 billion as of September 2026[update], according to Bloomberg.[1][2][3] He is the first Chinese centibillionaire.[4] On 4 November 2021, Zhang stepped down as CEO of ByteDance,[5] completing a leadership handover announced in May 2021.[6] According to Reuters, Zhang maintains over 50 percent of ByteDance's voting rights.[7] The surging global popularity of TikTok made Zhang the richest man in China in 2024.[8] Zhang was born on 1 April 1983, in Longyan, Fujian, China.[9] His parents were civil servants and he was an only son.[10] In 2001, he enrolled at Nankai University in Tianjin, where he majored in micro electronics engineering and software engineering. He graduated in 2005 with a BEng in computer engineering. He met his wife at university.[11] In February 2006, Zhang became the fifth employee and the first engineer at the travel website Kuxun. He was promoted to technical director a year later[12][13] In 2008, Zhang left Kuxun to work for Microsoft, but felt stifled by its corporate rules. He soon left Microsoft to join the startup Fanfou, which eventually failed.[14] In 2009, when Expedia was about to acquire Kuxun, Zhang took over Kuxun's real estate search business and started 99fang.com, his first company.[14] He quit the business three years later.[10] Zhang thought that Chinese smartphone users were struggling to find information in mobile apps available in 2012, and the search giant Baidu was mixing search results with undisclosed advertising. His vision was to push relevant content to users using recommendations generated by artificial intelligence.[15] This vision was not shared by most venture capitalists, and he failed to secure funding