He mania makes bydance collaborator Zhang Yiming’s richest person

Bytedance collaborator Zhang Yiming has become China’s richest man after investors bet on his potential companies. Zhang’s wealth has increased to $ 65.5 billion, before the Nongfu Spring giant Zong Shanshan founders $ 56.5 billion, according to Forbes’ estimates.

Zhang, 41, derives his net value from a 21% action in Bahemoth of private technology, though he withdrew as chairman in 2021 after resigning as chief executive earlier this year.

In secondary markets, Bytedance rating varies from $ 240 billion to over $ 400 billion, which is what some of its main investors including Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price Group believe that parent Tiktok is worth. Forbes thinks the company has a $ 312 billion rating, based on a recent shares purchase program, as well as conversations with analysts and a special Bytedance investor who prefers not to be named.

This amount marks a dance more than 40% from 2024, when some private market investors were only willing to receive by -award shares at a price that would suggest a $ 217 billion rating. The company took a turn from seemingly improved Tiktok situation in the US, after President Donald Trump said he “for sure” will extend the April 5 deadline for the short platform of popular video to be sold or banned, Glen Anderson, associate and CEO of Rainmaker’s Sasuria-based Sasuries in SH.BA.

Trump said on Sunday that he was negotiating with various American buyers for a tiktok’s action, and a deal could come soon.

In the meantime, investors have grown optimistic about the prospect for large country technology companies, including bydance. They are encouraged by the government’s friendly attitude towards private sector businesses and the country’s advances, despite US efforts to disrupt them with export controls. The Hang Seng Tech Index, which tracks the performance of companies such as Alibaba and Tencent, increased 80% over the past 12 months.

“All China’s technology riches organized a large return from the low base,” says Charlie Chai, a Shanghai -based analyst at the 86ressearch research firm, says Wechat.

For its part, bytedance has seen its Chatbot Doubao become second in the world the most popular he chatbot by monthly active users.

Powered by his large language model (LLM), the free product had 82 million mouses in February. Openai’s chatgt, who was no.1, had 400 million in the same month, according to AicPb.com, a Hunan -based website that traces it. Chatbot by the Chinese company AI Deepseek, which shocked Silicon Valley with its release in January of a very cost -effective model, was ranked 4th with 62 million mouses.

A spokesman for Bytedance refused to comment. Although no longer involved in the company’s daily operations, Zhang still plays a key role in his strategy, according to media reports.

The attractive billionaire has encouraged an intense focus on it, with the ultimate goal of realizing the general artificial intelligence (Agi), or the one that matches or exceeds human intelligence, according to the news -related newspaper. He runs the employment of the talent by him, the newspaper reported. Zhang reportedly agreed on an annual salary of over 10 million yuan ($ 1.4 million) to tear up a high engineer from a rival, according to local media reports.

Bytedance also set aside 40 billion yuan ($ 5.5 billion) for the purchase of chips in China in 2025 and $ 6.8 billion to invest in the infrastructure associated with abroad, according to a Financial Times report that mentioned anonymous sources. Last year, the company spent $ 8 billion on the server linked to it, a device that supports the computer needs of it, according to a Mars -based research report based on Beijing Cinda Securities.

But the 86resarch Chai warns that competition in it is becoming increasingly cut in China. Bytedance operates many well -known social media platforms, including Tiktok Douyin’s sister’s app, who has helped the company promote its Chatbot Doubao. But when it comes to the models of the one who empowers such services, it is the Chinese e -commerce giant Alibaba who is “leading the competition,” Chai says. Last week, Alibaba released her latest model of him, QWQ-32B, which boasted with improved performance and reasoning skills and does not require that data to train, by company.

Another model from Chinese e-commerce giant QWEN2.5-MAX is the ninth most popular model of him by voting of the user, according to Chatbot Arena, a ranking platform developed by researchers included by the University of California, Berkeley. Deepseek’s private R1 model is ranked no. 6, according to Chatbot Arena. Bytedance products are not in the first ten.

“While chatbots offer a convenient interface to confront the consumer to show the power of that to the public, what really matters is the backward patterns, which should be more rigorously evaluated in terms of performance and costs,” says Chai from Wechat. Alibaba is the main choice of the research firm from those criteria, he says.