Zhang Yiming, co-founder and former head of the Chinese group ByteDance, which owns the TikTok application targeted by several governments, saw his personal fortune melt by $17 billion last year, according to a benchmark ranking released Thursday.
However, he is still the second richest businessman in the world under the age of 40, with a bank account valued at 37,000 million dollars (about 34,000 million euros), according to this ranking prepared by the Chinese firm Hurun.
In front of him is Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of the American group Meta (Facebook and Instagram), with an estimated fortune of 68,000 million dollars, despite the 8,000 million losses last year, indicates Hurun. The firm does not give any explanation for these variations.
TikTok Ban Threat
Zhang Yiming, who co-founded ByteDance in Beijing in 2012, resigned from the group in 2021, amid China’s regulatory tightening against digital giants.
ByteDance quickly established itself in its country in the competitive world of the Internet thanks to its popular Douyin short video application. According to Hurun, the platform has the largest market capitalization in the world ($200 billion).
Its version for the international is TikTok, very popular among teenagers around the world, but threatened with a total ban in the United States in the name of national security. Critics accuse TikTok of allowing Chinese authorities to access user data from around the world, which the app disputes.
A heavy fine in the UK
Its boss, Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean with a Harvard degree, had struggled to defend his app in Congress last month, in the face of intractable elected officials, who mostly condemned TikTok out of hand.
The White House, the European Commission, the governments of Canada, Britain, Australia, and other organizations recently banned their officials from using TikTok on their work phones.
On Tuesday, TikTok was fined 12.7 million pounds (14.5 million euros) by Britain’s digital watchdog, the ICO, for “illegal” use of children’s personal data. Zhang Yiming, a Chinese citizen, now resides in Singapore.
Source: BFM TV
