Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok parent company ByteDance, has become the richest person in Asia, with an estimated fortune of $105.5 billion.
He has overtaken Indian tycoon Gautam Adani, whose wealth is estimated at $104.8 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Zhang’s fortune rose by about $12 billion this month after new valuations from BlackRock and Fidelity.
The Chinese entrepreneur owns roughly 21% of ByteDance. His wealth is now nearly eight times the $13 billion recorded in 2019, when Bloomberg began tracking his net worth.
How AI helped make Zhang Yiming the richest person in Asia
Artificial intelligence has been a major factor in the rise of Zhang’s wealth, as ByteDance has continued to invest in the technology while TikTok faced regulatory pressure in the United States.
ByteDance is understood to be able to use data from its social media platforms to train its AI models. The company’s technology businesses are increasingly viewed as a potential growth engine alongside TikTok, which has more than a billion daily active users, and its Chinese counterpart, Douyin, which has hundreds of millions of users.
“He plays his cards right,” Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at research firm Omdia, told Bloomberg. “He stayed on course and then continued to double down on AI investment.”
Zhang’s rise reflects the broader impact of the AI boom on the fortunes of the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs. Michael Dell, founder and chief executive of Dell Technologies, has also seen his wealth almost double in a year, making him the fifth-richest person in the world.
Dell, who owns 40% of his company, has gained about $122 billion, taking his fortune to an estimated $262 billion. Dell Technologies reported a sharp rise in adjusted earnings after revenue from AI-optimised servers increased by 757% to $16.1 billion.
Larry Page, the Google co-founder, has also benefited from enthusiasm around AI. Following the launch of the Gemini 3 model, Alphabet’s shares rose by 3%, helping push Page’s estimated wealth to $293 billion and making him the second-richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg.
The technology is also producing new fortunes. An analysis by Forbes found that the number of self-made billionaires under 30 reached a record high last year, with most having built their wealth through AI businesses.
Among them are Sualeh Asif, the 25-year-old creator of Anysphere, whose team developed the $29.3 billion AI editing tool Cursor, and Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha, co-founders of AI recruitment company Mercor.
Eight of the 11 young entrepreneurs examined in the analysis made their fortunes through AI innovations.
