Founder of "ByteDance" tops Asia's richest with fortune exceeding $105 billion

Zhang Yiming, the co-founder of ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, has become the richest person in Asia after his fortune surpassed $105 billion, surpassing Gautam Adani, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Zhang rose to the top for the first time following an increase in the company's valuation and its expansion into artificial intelligence.

Zhang Yiming, the co-founder of ByteDance, the company behind the TikTok app, has become the richest person in Asia after his estimated fortune exceeded $105 billion, surpassing Indian businessman Gautam Adani, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Zhang, 43, rose to the top of Asia's richest for the first time, following an increase in ByteDance's valuation and its continued expansion into technology and artificial intelligence fields. His fortune jumped by more than $12 billion this month, after Bloomberg analyzed recent valuations placed on their stakes in ByteDance by major investment firms, including BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, and T. Rowe Price. Estimates of his fortune vary among specialized entities, with Forbes estimating it at around $84 billion, compared to over $105 billion according to Bloomberg, with the discrepancy due to different methods of valuing ByteDance as a private, unlisted company. The company has intensified its investments in artificial intelligence through the chatbot "Doubao" and the video generator "Sydance," alongside working on training a massive model with 10 trillion parameters. Zhang's rise coincided with a decline in Adani's fortune after it reached around $120 billion in June, following a rebalancing of one of the MSCI indices at the end of August.