Zhang Yiming

Zhang Yiming
Born	1 4 1984 (age 42 years old (as of 2026) ) China
Occupation	internet entrepreneur
Known for	Co-founder and former chief executive of ByteDance
Education	Nankai University (BEng)

Chinese internet entrepreneur; main co-founder of ByteDance, owner of TikTok and Douyin

Zhang Yiming (born 1 April 1984) is a Chinese internet entrepreneur, the main co-founder of ByteDance, the company behind the short-video apps TikTok and Douyin and the news aggregator Toutiao.^[1] He stepped down as ByteDance's chief executive in 2021 and as its chairman later that year.^[1]^[2] On 20 October 2026 the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list ranked Zhang Yiming 24th in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$84 billion; Forbes lists the source of wealth as TikTok.^[1]^[3] In the annual World's Billionaires list published in 2026, Forbes had ranked Zhang Yiming 26th, at US$69.3 billion.^[4]

Early life and education

Forbes gives his date of birth as 1 April 1984, his birthplace as Longyan in China, and lists a Bachelor of Engineering from Nankai University.^[1] Nankai University describes both Zhang and ByteDance's current chief executive, Liang Rubo, as members of its class of 2001 intake.^[5] The company's 2021 announcement of the leadership change described Liang as his university classmate.^[6]

Business career

According to Forbes, Zhang started ByteDance in 2012 in a four-bedroom apartment in Beijing and launched the news-aggregation app Toutiao a few months later.^[1] The company's short-video app Douyin and its international counterpart TikTok made ByteDance one of the world's most valuable technology companies.^[2] Forbes says TikTok has more than a billion users worldwide, that ByteDance also has interests in e-commerce, education, gaming and news, and that its Doubao AI assistant became China's most popular AI app in the first quarter of 2026, according to the data firm QuestMobile.^[1]

In a letter to staff dated 19 May 2021 and published by the company, Zhang announced that he would hand the chief executive role to Liang Rubo. He said he wanted to concentrate on long-term breakthroughs rather than incremental progress.^[6] Caixin reported that Liang had been ByteDance's head of human resources and that the change came weeks after Shou Zi Chew was appointed chief executive of TikTok.^[2] Forbes records that Zhang also stepped down as chairman in November 2021, and that this was reportedly under pressure from the Chinese government.^[1]

Wealth

Forbes attributes Zhang's wealth to his stake in ByteDance and gives the source of wealth as TikTok.^[1] Other investors in ByteDance include the US trading firm Susquehanna International Group; CNBC reported in 2024 that it owned about 15% of the company.^[7]

Wealth history

Forbes has included this entry in its annual World's Billionaires list in 9 of the editions from 2001 to 2026 checked for this profile, starting with 2018. The table gives the rank and estimated net worth in each annual list.^[4]^[1]

Forbes estimates by list year
Year	World's Billionaires rank	Net worth (US$ bn)
2018	550	4.0
2019	70	16.2
2020	61	16.2
2021	39	35.6
2022	25	50.0
2023	26	45.0
2024	27	43.4
2025	23	65.5
2026	26	69.3

Philanthropy

On 21 August 2024 Nankai University announced that Zhang and Liang Rubo had jointly donated 200 million yuan to the university, mainly to support mathematics research and the training of researchers.^[5] No personal foundation for Zhang was found in the sources checked.

Political activity

Zhang is not recorded in the sources checked as holding any position in the Chinese state or party advisory bodies.

On 11 April 2018, after attacks on Toutiao in state media, including the broadcaster CCTV, and a regulator's notice that Toutiao and the live-streaming service Kuaishou would be subject to "rectification measures", Zhang posted a public apology on WeChat. The China Media Project, which translated the text, characterised it as a political self-criticism made under heavy pressure from the authorities.^[8]

Controversies and legal issues

ByteDance's ownership of TikTok became a long-running issue in the United States. Caixin noted in 2021 that the first Trump administration had issued executive orders in 2020 seeking to ban or force the sale of TikTok on national-security grounds.^[2] Forbes records that in May 2024 ByteDance sued the US government to overturn a law signed by President Joe Biden that would force the sale of TikTok or ban it nationwide.^[1] In January 2026 the TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC was established under an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on 25 September 2025, as a majority-American-owned company holding TikTok's US data, algorithm security and content moderation functions.^[9] NBC News reported that ByteDance would keep a 19.9% stake, and that the investor group included Oracle, Silver Lake and the UAE investment firm MGX.^[10]

International and political links

This section uses the same ten headings for every profile in this series. Only specific, sourced actions are included; company-level and foundation-level actions are labelled as such. Where nothing was found, the entry reads "No documented involvement found in sources checked."

Israel (investments, operations, donations, contracts, statements)

These are company-level actions. After the 7 October 2023 attack, TikTok said it had added moderators who speak Arabic and Hebrew and had removed more than 500,000 videos and closed 8,000 livestreams in the region for breaching its guidelines.^[11] TikTok has an Israeli general manager, Assaf Sagy, who was interviewed by Calcalist in December 2020 about criticism of ByteDance's handling of data.^[12]