(Bloomberg) — Just last year, the world’s most valuable startup, ByteDance Ltd., was being squeezed from all sides.
The Trump administration wanted the Chinese firm, which owns the ubiquitous TikTok video-sharing platform, to get rid of assets. Beijing was cracking down on tech businesses, and India blacklisted some of its social-media apps.
For all the obstacles, ByteDance kept growing. Now its founder, 38-year-old Zhang Yiming, is among the world’s richest people — a distinction that lately has carried increased risks in China.
Shares of the company trade in the private market at a valuation of more than $250 billion, people familiar with the dealings have said. At that level, Zhang, who owns about a quarter of ByteDance, could be worth more than $60 billion, placing him alongside Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s Pony Ma, bottled-water king Zhong Shanshan and members of the Walton and Koch families in the U.S., according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
ByteDance, famous for its short-video apps and news aggregator Toutiao, more than doubled revenue last year after expanding beyond its core advertising business into areas such as e-commerce and online gaming. It’s now weighing options for the initial public offering of some businesses.
“Zhang is someone who’s known for thinking long-term and not easily dissuaded by short-term setbacks,” said Ma Rui, partner at venture-capital firm Synaptic Ventures. “He is set on building an enduring, global business.”
Surging Valuation
During its last fundraising round, ByteDance reached a $180 billion valuation, a person with knowledge of the matter said. That’s up from $20 billion about three years ago, according to CB Insights. But in the private market, some investors recently were asking for the equivalent of a $350 billion valuation to part with their shares, people familiar have said. The company’s value for private-equity investors is approaching $400 billion, the South China Morning Post reported. That would mean an even bigger fortune for Zhang.
ByteDance representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment.
It’s a tough time to be wealthy in China as the government seeks to rein in the country’s most powerful corporations and their billionaire founders. Just ask Jack Ma: After opening an antitrust probe, regulators fined Alibaba a record $2.8 billion and the central bank ordered an overhaul of his Ant Group Co. fintech empire so it’d be supervised more like a bank. On Tuesday, China ordered 34 internet companies to rectify their anti-competitive practices in the coming month.
While ByteDance hasn’t been singled out as a target, its dominance in social media and war chest for deal-making are sensitive areas the government is looking into.
“There are no more silly games in the U.S. with Trump and potential bans or forced asset sales,” said Kirk Boodry, founder of investment research firm Redex Holdings. “But the pressure on tech-share prices and China in particular might make $250 billion a tough sell,” he added, referring to ByteDance’s value in private transactions.
Born in the southern Chinese city of Longyan, Zhang, the only son of civil servants, studied programming at Tianjin’s Nankai University, where he built a following on the school’s online forum by fixing classmates’ computers. He joined Microsoft Corp. for a brief stint after graduating, later calling the job so boring he often “worked half of the day and read books in the other half,” according to an interview with Chinese media. He went on to develop several ventures, including a real estate search portal.
