Mukesh Ambani has been knocked off his perch. Zhang Yiming, the co-founder of ByteDance, has overtaken the Indian billionaire to become Asia’s second-richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a net worth that has now climbed to $92.8 billion.
The ascent has been vertiginous. When Bloomberg first began tracking Zhang’s wealth in March 2019, he was worth $13 billion. His fortune has since swelled more than sevenfold, fuelled by ByteDance’s rise as China’s highest-profile private company and the global dominance of TikTok.
The immediate catalyst is a sharp upward revision in ByteDance’s valuation, triggered by assessments from institutional investors including BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, T. Rowe Price Group, HSG and General Atlantic. That analysis alone added more than $24 billion to Zhang’s wealth. Bloomberg had previously applied a 25 per cent risk discount to ByteDance’s valuation after the US House of Representatives passed a bill in March 2024 requiring the sale of TikTok’s American operations or face a ban. That discount was cut to 10 per cent on June 2, reflecting the completion of the US sale and the first post-spinoff valuations from institutional investors filed in late May.
TikTok’s American business has since been transferred to a consortium led by Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX, ending years of political and regulatory turbulence over what critics argued were national security risks.
But the bigger story is what ByteDance is building next. The company is betting heavily on artificial intelligence, discussing expenditure of as much as $70 billion this year to lead the Chinese AI market and challenge the top American players globally. Much of that war chest is expected to come from the roughly $50 billion in profit ByteDance generated in 2025. Its Doubao AI chatbot already boasts more than 300 million monthly users, making it China’s most popular, and its success has been so pronounced that ByteDance is preparing to introduce subscription fees, a rare move in a country where users have historically resisted paying for online services.
Amy Lin, a Shanghai-based analyst at Capital Securities, was sanguine about the company’s prospects. “The jump in valuation reflects the company’s strong fundamentals and the success of its apps such as Doubao in China,” she said. “The developments in the US are unlikely to have a major negative impact.”
Ke Yan, a Singapore-based tech analyst at DZT Research, put it more bluntly. “Removing the US overhang unlocked the re-rating of the remaining ByteDance entity,” he said. “Even with the re-rating, the valuation still looks cheap on fundamentals.”
Zhang first became China’s richest person in 2025, was briefly overtaken, then reclaimed the title earlier this year. He now holds it firmly, and has Asia’s second spot to go with it. Ambani, meanwhile, has dropped to third with a net worth of $86.9 billion. Gautam Adani retains the top position in Asia at $117.4 billion.
ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment.
For Zhang, the numbers tell a simple story: build something the world cannot stop using, then build the next thing before anyone else does. So far, that formula has worked rather well.