As investors continue to bet on companies with AI potential, the co-founder ByteDance, Zhang Yiming, has emerged as the richest man in China with a net worth of $65.5 billion, as per Forbes estimates.
The 41-year-old derives his net worth from a 21 percent stake in the privately held tech behemoth that owns TikTok. He was also ByteDance's chairman and CEO until 2021 and although he is no longer involved in the company’s day-to-day operations, Zhang continues to play a key role in its AI strategy, according to media reports.
Here are seven things to know about this reclusive billionaire:
1.) By his own account, Zhang Yiming is not very social. He prefers his own company, and in an internal memo, he had told his employees, before stepping down as the CEO, that he lacked certain qualities necessary in a good manager.
"The truth is, I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager. I'm more interested in analysing organizational and market principles, and leveraging these theories to further reduce management work, rather than actually managing people," Zhang wrote in 2021. "Similarly, I'm not very social, preferring solitary activities like being online, reading, listening to music, and contemplating what may be possible."
2.) At ByteDance, Zhang has encouraged an intense focus on AI to realise artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that matches or surpasses human intelligence, according to China's The Paper reported. He spearheads the company’s hiring of AI-related talents and reportedly agreed to an over 10 million yuan ($1.4 million) annual salary to poach a top AI engineer from a rival company.
3.) Zhang had started ByteDance in 2012 in a four-bedroom apartment in Beijing. He was a 29-year-old software engineer-turned-entrepreneur at the time and wanted to use big data and machine learning to analyse and curate content according to user preferences, The Washington Post reported.
4.) In 2015, Zhang revealed that he got the idea for ByteDance when he noticed that fewer people were reading newspapers on the subway. He said he realised that phones would become the main means to disseminate information and that personalisation would be the order of the day.
5.) Zhang studied software engineering at Nankai University in Tianjin, where he fixed other students’ computers and set up websites to earn extra money.
6.) He joined Microsoft after graduation but quit after about six months because he was “bored,” Zhang said in 2014, The Washington Post reported. He then went on to launch a real estate platform before starting ByteDance.
7.) In a 2017 interview, Zhang said that he was hopeful of ByteDance becoming as global as Google while at the same time acknowledging the challenges. “If when Chinese companies go overseas, they can overcome cultural problems, will the overseas market be huge? I am both optimistic and pessimistic about this,” The Washington Post quoted him as saying.
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