Zhang Yiming, cofounder of TikTok owner ByteDance, has overtaken beverage giant Nongfu Spring chairman Zhong Shanshan as the richest man in China, according to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List.
Zhang, 40, clinched the crown for the first time with a fortune of $45.6 billion, a tad above Zhong’s $43.3 billion, according to Forbes estimates. He stepped down as chairman of the web giant in 2021 after resigning as chief executive earlier that year.
Zhang continues to derive his net worth from a stake in the privately held company, which Forbes thinks has a valuation of $217 billion based on analyst interviews and data from trading platforms where investors can buy and sell stakes in companies that aren’t publicly listed.
Although ByteDance’s valuation has come down from a peak of more than $400 billion in 2021 due to geopolitical tensions and a broad technology downturn, Zhang’s wealth now surpasses that of Nongfu Spring’s Zhong.
The 69-year-old beverage mogul, China’s richest person for three years in a row, is struggling to grow Nongfu Spring’s core bottled water business. The company’s Hong Kong-listed shares lost another 7.5% since it announced 2024 interim results on Aug. 28, a day on which Zhong saw his wealth plunge $4.4 billion as investors reacted to an 18.5% year-on-year contraction in bottled water sales amid stiff competition and public relations missteps.
Nongfu Spring is trading at its lowest price since its initial public offering in 2020. In early August, Zhong lost the China’s richest person crown to e-commerce giant PDD Holdings’ founder Colin Huang. But PDD’s Nasdaq-listed shares crashed 30% overnight on Aug. 26, when management forecast in an analyst call much slower profit growth, robbing Huang of the crown.
Yet ByteDance faces significant problems as well. Zhang, who keeps a low profile and described himself as “not very social” in a letter announcing his 2021 resignation, has handed the reins to his college roommate Liang Rubo, who has worked a long time at the company and was previously its head of human resources. Zhang now resides in Singapore, according to court documents.
ByteDance is fighting in the U.S. Supreme Court a ban-or-divest order signed by U.S. President Joe Biden in April. The order gives the Chinese company until January to sell the wildly popular TikTok or face a ban as American lawmakers argue that its Chinese ownership poses national security risks. Amid such uncertainties and dim prospects for an IPO, some ByteDance investors—such as billionaire Philippe Laffont’s venture firm Coatue Management—are reportedly considering selling parts of their stakes in private markets. Laffont has left ByteDance’s board of directors and been replaced by billionaire Xavier Neil, who owns France’s telecom giant Iliad.
Despite its challenges abroad, ByteDance’s domestic business is doing relatively well. Glen Anderson, cofounder and CEO of U.S.-based broker-dealer Rainmaker Securities, says the “amazingly profitable” China business is exactly why investors haven’t discounted ByteDance further following Biden’s signing of the ban-or-divest order. In 2023, ByteDance reportedly grew sales to $120 billion from $80 billion in the previous year, while earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization surged to more than $40 billion from about $25 billion in 2022, according to a Bloomberg report. The company generates revenues from digital advertisement placed on TikTok’s sister app in China, Douyin, which has more than 700 million daily active users at home.
