According to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List, Zhang Yiming, creator of TikTok owner ByteDance, now has more wealth than Nongfu Spring chairman Zhong Shanshan.
Zhang, 40, won the title for the first time with a fortune of $45.6 billion, slightly more than Zhong’s $43.3 billion, according to Forbes calculations. He stepped down as chairman of the web behemoth in 2021, having resigned as CEO earlier that year.
Zhang continues to derive his net worth from a stake in the privately owned company, which Forbes believes is worth $217 billion based on analyst interviews and data from trading platforms where investors may buy and sell stakes in non-publicly traded corporations.
ByteDance’s valuation has decreased from over $400 billion in 2021 because to geopolitical tensions and a technology downturn. However, Zhang’s wealth now exceeds that of Zhong from Nongfu Spring.
The 69-year-old beverage entrepreneur, China’s richest person for three years running, is battling to expand Nongfu Spring’s primary bottled water business. The company’s Hong Kong-listed shares have fallen another 7.5% since it reported 2024 interim results on August 28, the same day that Zhong saw his wealth plummet by $4.4 billion as investors responded to an 18.5% year-on-year drop in bottled water sales due to tough competition and public relations errors.
Nongfu Spring is now selling at its lowest price since its initial public offering in 2020. In early August, Zhong lost the title of China’s richest person to Colin Huang, founder of e-commerce giant PDD Holdings. However, PDD’s Nasdaq-listed shares fell 30% overnight on August 26, as management forecasted significantly slower profit growth in an analyst call, depriving Huang of the crown.
However, ByteDance is not without its challenges. Zhang, who keeps a quiet profile and called himself as “not very social” in a letter announcing his 2021 resignation, has delegated authority to his college classmate Liang Rubo, who has long worked at the company and was previously its head of human resources. Zhang now lives in Singapore, according to court filings.
ByteDance is challenging in the United States Supreme Court a ban-or-divest order issued by President Joe Biden in April. The Chinese corporation has until January to sell the popular TikTok app or face a ban from American lawmakers, who believe its ownership poses national security dangers. With such uncertainty and bleak prospects for an IPO, several ByteDance investors, including billionaire Philippe Laffont’s venture firm Coatue Management, are reportedly considering selling some of their interests in private markets. Laffont has departed ByteDance’s board of directors to be replaced by billionaire Xavier Neil, who owns France’s telecom company Iliad.
Despite its international issues, ByteDance’s home company is performing relatively well. Glen Anderson, cofounder and CEO of Rainmaker Securities in the United States, believes ByteDance’s “amazingly profitable” China business is the reason investors haven’t devalued the company further since Biden signed the ban-or-divest order. ByteDance’s revenues reportedly increased to $120 billion in 2023 from $80 billion the previous year, while earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization increased to more than $40 billion from $25 billion in 2022, according to Bloomberg. The company makes money by running digital advertisements on TikTok’s Chinese sibling app, Douyin, which has over 700 million daily active users at home.