Mumbai/IBNS-CMEDIA: Chinese Zhang Yiming has overtaken Reliance Industries Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani to become Asia’s second-richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Zhang, the founder of ByteDance, climbed to the No. 2 spot as the company’s valuation surged amid growing investor confidence in its Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities and future growth prospects.
Richest Person In China
With a net worth of $92.8 billion, Zhang is now the richest person in China and among the wealthiest individuals globally.
TikTok Fuels Wealth Surge
A significant portion of Zhang’s fortune is tied to the success of TikTok, ByteDance’s short-video platform that has become one of the world’s most popular social media applications.
TikTok’s global monthly active users are estimated at 1.8-1.9 billion, up from approximately 1.5-1.6 billion in early 2025.
The platform added hundreds of millions of users over the past year and remains the fifth-largest social media platform globally.
User engagement also remains exceptionally strong, with people spending an average of 90-95 minutes per day on the app.
The Rise Of ByteDance
Zhang founded ByteDance in Beijing in 2012 with a vision of using artificial intelligence to personalize content delivery.
The company’s first breakthrough product was Toutiao, a news aggregation platform powered by recommendation algorithms that adapted to users’ interests.
ByteDance later launched Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese counterpart, in 2016, followed by the international launch of TikTok in 2017.
Today, ByteDance is regarded as one of the world’s most valuable technology companies, with its AI-driven content ecosystem continuing to drive growth and investor interest.
