ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming is China’s richest person again after his fortune jumped 43% to $99.7 billion on the back of the company’s AI push.
Chinese billionaire Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd., is once again the richest person in China after his fortune rose 43% to $99.7 billion in a year, driven by the company’s push into artificial intelligence.
Zhang’s net worth climbed by $33.8 billion, the biggest gain of anyone in the country, according to the 2026 Hurun China Rich List published on Tuesday. That put him well ahead of Zhong Shanshan, the bottled-water tycoon who topped last year’s ranking, whose fortune fell 23% to $61 billion.
“Almost all of it on the back of AI,” Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun Report, said of Zhang’s gain.
ByteDance’s profit rose on advertising and AI revenue from Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, from TikTok itself and from Doubao, its chatbot. Hoogewerf said Doubao is the most widely used AI assistant in China. Hurun describes ByteDance as China’s most valuable privately held startup.
Zhang, 43, set up ByteDance in Beijing in 2012 and stepped down as chief executive in 2021. He also topped the Hurun list in 2024. He is the 18th different person to rank first in the list’s 28 years.
