Zhang Yiming, the primary cofounder of ByteDance, a Chinese software behemoth best known for its wildly popular app TikTok, is the richest man in China, with a net worth of $65.5 billion, according to Forbes.
Among the apps in ByteDance’s portfolio are TikTok, a video-based social networking app with over 1 billion users globally, and Toutiao, the biggest general news portal in China.
Here are some interesting facts about this billionaire who cofounded one of the most innovative technology companies in the world, ByteDance.
Zhang Yiming, by his own account, is not a social butterfly. He enjoys solitary pursuits like reading, being online, and listening to music. He is interested in analyzing market and organizational principles at work.
In 2012, Zhang established ByteDance in a Beijing apartment. At the time, he was a 29-year-old software engineer who wanted to employ machine learning and big data to analyze and create content based on user preferences, according to The Washington Post. Zhang and his colleagues at ByteDance pioneered the use of machine learning in mobile Internet products.
Zhang resigned as ByteDance’s CEO and chairman in 2021. Media reports claim that Zhang is still a major player in the company’s AI strategy even though he is no longer involved in day-to-day operations.
Zhang stated in 2015 that he saw fewer people reading newspapers on the subway, which gave him the idea for ByteDance. He claimed to have realized that personalization would become the norm and that phones would eventually become the primary method of information dissemination.
Zhang studied software engineering at Nankai University in Tianjin. After graduating, Zhang joined Microsoft, but he left after about six months because he was “bored,” according to a 2014 Washington Post report.
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