In September 2026, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming topped the list of Asia's richest people for the first time, with a fortune of over 105 billion dollars. He overtook Indian industrialist Gautam Adani, whose fortune is estimated at 104,8 billion. This shift did not come about through traditional industries such as energy or real estate, but thanks to algorithms and artificial intelligence.
Back in March 2019, Bloomberg valued Zhang's fortune at 13 billion dollars. Over seven years it has grown more than eightfold. The main driver is the rise in ByteDance's value, whose valuation has reached 550 billion dollars. The company is actively investing in AI: this year alone, 160 billion yuan has been allocated to technology development, a significant portion of which went to purchasing chips.
ByteDance did not stop at TikTok's success. It launched the Doubao chatbot and the Seedance video generation tool, and is also training a model with 10 trillion parameters. These products turn vast arrays of user data into new sources of income. Investors BlackRock, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price updated their valuations of the company's assets, which added more than 12 billion dollars to Zhang in September alone.
A comparison with other Asian billionaires shows a paradigm shift. Mukesh Ambani, Tadashi Yanai of Uniqlo and Zhong Shanshan of Nongfu Spring have fallen behind. Wealth built on oil, clothing or water is giving way to platforms that predict users' desires and monetize attention through AI.
For the ordinary investor, Zhang's story is a lesson in how early bets on technology scale up. ByteDance began with video recommendations, and now it is converting those competencies into AI products. Those who invested in the company at an early stage, or simply followed the trends, saw how data and algorithms turn into capital faster than traditional assets.
Regulatory risks, including the threat of a TikTok ban in the United States, did not stop the growth. Zhang stepped back from day-to-day management five years ago, but his vision continues to define the company's trajectory. This is a reminder: long-term value is often hidden in non-obvious technological bets.
Zhang Yiming's story shows that in 2026, wealth in Asia is increasingly created not by factories and ports, but by the ability of algorithms to understand and anticipate the behavior of billions of users.
