TikTok Founder Is Now China’s Richest Man

The Hurun Research Institute released its latest ranking, the Hurun China Rich List 2024, this Tuesday and revealed that Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance—TikTok’s parent company—, is at the top of the list with a personal wealth of $49.3 billion.

According to Reuters, Zhang performed better than his counterparts in renewables and real estate. China’s richest man is 41 years old and in 2021 resigned from his position as chief executive of ByteDance.

Zhang moved four slots up to first place compared to the previous year, surpassing China’s bottled water magnate Zhong Shanshan. According to Hurun’s report, Zhang’s company performed significantly better than last year: “ByteDance’s global revenue grew 30% last year to US$110 billion, with users in the US of its TikTok app closing in on 200 million.”

The document also states that there are 1,094 Chinese citizens with over $700 million, but that this number has been decreasing. China lost 432 billionaires within the past 5 years.

Despite all the recent challenges for the company, like a ban in the European Union and multiple lawsuits in the United States, Bytedance has been thriving in the past year, making his creator richer. Zhang‘s net worth increased 43% compared to 2023.

And other tech company founders keep thriving as well. According to the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people published a few days ago, at the top of the list is Elon Musk—for the third year in a row—with an estimated net worth of $244 billion, followed by Jeff Bezos with $197 billion and Mark Zuckerberg with $181 billion.