TikTok's Value Soars... Founder Zhang Yiming Becomes China's Richest Person for the First Time

Zhang Yiming's Net Worth Reaches About $84 Billion
ByteDance's Corporate Value Reassessment Adds $10 Billion
Trump Proposes Tariff Reduction for China if TikTok Is Sold

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming (41), the parent company of TikTok, has become the richest person in China for the first time, Bloomberg reported on the 26th (local time).

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zhang Yiming's net worth was estimated at $57.5 billion (approximately 84.6 trillion KRW) on that day. He surpassed Zhong Shanshan, founder of bottled water company Nongfu Spring, and Ma Huateng, co-founder of Tencent Holdings.

Bloomberg explained that Zhang Yiming's assets increased by more than $10 billion following the revaluation of ByteDance's corporate value to $365 billion.

Zhang Yiming is currently ranked as the third richest person in Asia, following Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries in India, and Gautam Adani, chairman of the Adani Group in India.

In China, ByteDance is one of the leading companies in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry. ByteDance's AI chatbot Doubao has 75 million monthly active users.

Zhang Yiming, a Chinese national residing in Singapore, holds a 21% stake in ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, which has over one billion users.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump mentioned the possibility of tariff reductions on China conditional on the sale of TikTok's business rights. President Trump stated that if ByteDance, a Chinese company, cooperates in selling TikTok's U.S. business rights, tariffs on China could be reduced.

The U.S. Congress enacted the so-called "TikTok Ban Act" in April last year, citing concerns that ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, collects large amounts of personal data from Americans and poses a national security threat. The law stipulates that if TikTok's U.S. business rights are not sold to an American company within a set deadline, TikTok's operations in the U.S. will be banned. However, after President Trump took office on January 20, he signed an executive order delaying the law's enforcement by 75 days, allowing TikTok to resume its service narrowly.