Profile of Zhang Yiming, TikTok owner who is on the list of the world’s richest people – Jakarta –Â Since it was first launched in recent years, TikTok has developed into one of the most widely used social media in the world. According to the We Are Social report, TikTok currently has more than 1 billion global monthly active users.
In Indonesia alone, TikTok is played by more than 100 million people. Users also spend an average of up to 29 hours per month surfing this application. In this way, TikTok is in fourth place as the most used social media platform in the country.
The rapid growth of this short video platform has made some people curious about the person who owns TikTok. Who is he?
Who Owns TikTok?
TikTok is an application made by ByteDance Technology Co which was first released under the name ‘Douyin’ in China in 2016. The ByteDance company was founded by Zhang Yiming in 2012.
Since its initial release, Douyin has received a positive response from social media users in the bamboo curtain country. Success was not achieved instantly. At that time, Zhang required all his employees to download and have a TikTok account.
He even asked his employees to make their own TikTok videos and required them to get a certain number of likes. If not, they will be punished with push-ups.
The big steps taken by Zhang produced good results. This success made him want to expand TikTok to international markets.
In 2017, ByteDance bought and acquired the popular American application Musical.ly for $1 billion to merge it with TikTok. After that, TikTok succeeded in entering foreign markets.
Until now, TikTok has entered the list of social media platforms with the most users throughout the world. The popularity of this application can also be seen from various social media trends and phenomena that have been busy and viral.
Profile Zhang Yiming
Reported by the Business Insider page, Zhang Yiming was born in 1983 in Fujian province, China. Its name is taken from a Chinese proverb, which means “surprise everyone with the first attempt”.
Zhang graduated from Nankai University in 2005. He majored in microelectronics before switching to software engineering. After graduating from college, he worked at a digital travel booking startup company called Kuxun, which was later acquired by Tripadvisor. He was among the first employees there.
In his second year of work, he was responsible for back-end technology. But he also actively participates when the product experiences problems. From there he learned sales skills which he used to develop ByteDance.
After also working at Microsoft for a while, Zhang began producing his own applications and founded several startup companies, including a real estate search portal.
Finally, he focused on founding the ByteDance company in 2012 in an apartment in Beijing. The first product is a news aggregation application called Toutiao. Zhang created this platform to compete with Baidu, China’s largest search engine.
Toutiao is an AI-based news recommendation engine that customizes news based on its users’ interests. As the app quickly reached millions of downloads, Zhang then partnered with Chinese smartphone manufacturers to embed it into their new phone models.
In 2013, he was also included in the list of members of Forbes China’s 30 under 30.
Then ByteDance launched a short video platform called Douyin in 2016 in China. While in the international market it is known as TikTok, in China it is known as Douyin.
Then ByteDance has several social networking applications operating in China. The company released the FlipChat platform which is said to be a rival to WeChat and a video messaging application called Duoshan in 2019. ByteDance also has interests in everything from news to education to video games.
In 2021, Zhang stepped down from the position of chairman and CEO of ByteDance. He reportedly acted in this way because he was under pressure from the Chinese government.
Most of Zhang’s wealth comes from his shares of more than 20% in ByteDance. From this source of income alone, he has a net worth of $43.4 billion or the equivalent of IDR 680 trillion, according to Forbes estimates as of (12/10/2023).
With this wealth, Zhang, at the age of 40, has managed to rank as the 26th richest person in the world. He also won the position of the 2nd richest person in China.
Apart from that, the South China Morning Post channel also reported that Zhang Yiming founded a private investment company in Hong Kong. This is surprising news from him, considering that he resigned from his two positions at ByteDance in 2021.
That is information about the figure of the boss who owns TikTok, Zhang Yiming.
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