TikTok founder Zhang Yiming surpasses Gautam Adani as Asia’s richest

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming has overtaken Indian billionaire Gautam Adani to become Asia’s richest person with his wealth reaching over $105 billion, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index said.

Zhang’s fortune has surged more than $12 billion this month after Bloomberg incorporated updated valuations from investment firms including BlackRock, Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price, reports say citing the index.

The 43-year-old Chinese entrepreneur founded TikTok’s parent company ByteDance and resigned as CEO in 2021. His wealth has soared partly thanks to the company’s growing artificial intelligence business, in addition to its social media businesses.

ByteDance’s AI products include the Doubao chatbot and Seedance video-generation tools. The company’s growing valuation has helped drive Zhang’s fortune to more than eight times its reported level of $13 billion in March 2019.

Adani, the founder and chairman of the Adani Group, has been the richest person in Asia at various points in recent years.

As the value of technology and artificial intelligence companies rises, Zhang’s rise marks another shift among Asia’s wealthy. The Bloomberg index follows the fortunes of billionaires on the basis of publicly available market and valuation data.