TikTok’s Founder Has a Formula for Everything. Can It Crack the Supreme Court?
Stu Woo and Raffaele Huang
8 min read
SINGAPORE—Zhang Yiming chose a college by calculating which schools were far from home and had a favorable female-to-male ratio for finding love. He bought his first home by devising a formula to identify Beijing’s best community.
And he became China’s richest person after creating TikTok, the massively popular app built around an algorithm that predicts the videos people would enjoy based on their previous activity.
But 41-year-old Zhang has no formula to guide him through TikTok’s biggest challenge yet.
The Supreme Court heard arguments on Friday over the constitutionality of a national-security law that would effectively ban the app in the U.S. Most justices voiced doubts about TikTok’s arguments, viewing the law not as a restriction on free speech but instead as targeting its Chinese ownership.
The showdown threatens to unravel Zhang’s biggest accomplishment to date, as well as his greatest desire. Zhang has long said his dream is to run a business that is successful even beyond his native land of 1.4 billion people.
“China’s internet users account for only one-fifth of worldwide users,” he said at a 2016 conference. He concluded there was only one way for his company to compete with the best: “Going global is a must.”
Last year, Zhang became China’s richest person, with a net worth of about $49 billion, according to the Hurun Research Institute, which studies Chinese wealth. Much of his fortune comes from his stake in TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, which also operates hit Chinese apps. He is ByteDance’s single largest shareholder, with a 21% equity stake, and has majority control over the company through shares with extra voting rights.
Zhang Yiming’s goal has been for TikTok to have global reach. It has 170 million users in the U.S. and has transformed businesses around the world, including livestreamed clothing sales in the Philippines, shown above. - Ezra Acayan/Getty Images
Born in 1983, Zhang grew up in China’s southeastern province of Fujian. His father ran an electronics factory, and his mother was a nurse. As a middle-schooler, Zhang once said in an interview, he read newspapers cover to cover.
When it came time to pick a college, he recalled in a speech to his alumni association, he set four criteria: One, it had to be far from home. Two, it had to have snow, because he had never seen any before. Three, it needed to be close to the sea, because he loves seafood.
The fourth was the gender ratio. Engineering schools in China were about 80% male at the time, so an all-around college with more gender balance would minimize the time he spent on love.
“There may be 20,000 people in the world who are suitable for you, and then you just need to find that one in 20,000,” he said in a 2015 interview. “That is, you are within the acceptable range, which is close to the optimal solution.”
He brought his thick southern accent north to the only school that met all his conditions, Nankai University in Tianjin, where he studied software engineering. His side hustle was fixing computers for classmates. “Of course, most of them were female,” he joked in the alumni speech. One client eventually became his wife.
His early jobs included a brief stint at Microsoft’s China office, where he said he had so much free time that he read books including “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” In 2012 Zhang founded ByteDance in a Beijing apartment. At the time, the trend in the tech industry was showing people content based on their connections on social-media platforms such as Facebook.
Zhang revolutionized the global industry with another approach. “The idea is so simple but so powerful: that you should be looking at content not based on who you know, but really based on your own behavior,” said Shou Chew, TikTok’s chief, in a 2023 interview.
ByteDance developed a hit app called Jinri Toutiao, which translates to Today’s Headlines. Noticing that Beijing subway riders were using their smartphones to catch up on the news, the company developed an app that recommended stories based on what people had previously read and how much time they spent on an article.
Zhang Yiming attended the third Wuzhen World Internet Conference in 2016. - VCG via Getty Images
In 2014, Zhang went to Silicon Valley and visited companies including Facebook, Tesla and Airbnb. He felt he could compete with them.
“The ‘golden age’ of Chinese tech companies is coming,” he wrote in a blog post at the time.
TikTok and its Chinese version, Douyin, soon followed. As of the second quarter of 2024, TikTok and Douyin combined to be the fifth most-downloaded app of all time, trailing only four Meta Platforms products—WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger and Instagram, according to research firm Sensor Tower. TikTok and Douyin also combined to become the first nongame app to reach $17 billion in all-time consumer spending, Sensor Tower said, with 22% of that revenue coming from the U.S.
In 2021, Zhang stepped down as ByteDance chief executive. He said in a letter to employees that he wanted more time to focus on long-term strategy. People close to him said he also wanted to avoid being targeted by the Chinese government campaign.
He spent months reading academic papers and meeting researchers in artificial intelligence, then had teams created to build AI applications. He met other business leaders, including Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang, whose company sells chips that ByteDance relies on to train AI.
He set up a venture fund in Hong Kong to invest in tech companies, including in AI, and moved from Beijing to Singapore, the tiny English-speaking country with a mostly ethnically Chinese population.
In 2020, Zhang told employees he disagreed with U.S. efforts to force ByteDance to sell TikTok’s American operations, saying the company could find other ways to address the government’s concerns. But since then, Zhang hasn’t commented publicly on TikTok’s showdown with Washington.
Congress passed a law last year that started the clock on ByteDance to find a new owner for TikTok in the U.S., or risk a shutdown. Some content creators have said a ban would eliminate a marketplace of ideas. - J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
The Supreme Court could strike down the ban on TikTok on First Amendment grounds, or leave its future up to President-elect Donald Trump, who has said he wants to find a way to let TikTok remain in the U.S.
The court could also uphold the law and let it go into effect as scheduled on Jan. 19, a day before Trump enters office. In that case, TikTok would lose access to its most important market, where it has 170 million users and generates roughly a fifth of its global revenue. TikTok wouldn’t disappear from phones overnight, and it wouldn’t be illegal to use it, but people wouldn’t be able to download or update the app, making it gradually unusable.
TikTok is already banned in India, the world’s most populous nation, after that country’s border clashes with China.
These days, Zhang lives a low-profile life in Singapore, where several other ByteDance leaders are also based. Though he has no formal title at his company, he makes big strategic decisions, according to people close to him.
He sporadically shows up wearing a face mask at the Singapore office, in a building with the ByteDance logo across the waterfront from the city-state’s Marina Bay Sands hotel-casino. He isn’t closely involved in TikTok’s efforts to fight the U.S. law, the people said, instead delegating that task to Chew and Liang Rubo, ByteDance’s current CEO.
Despite his company’s uncertain American future, Zhang has persisted in hounding his mostly Chinese senior executives to focus on what he believes is nonnegotiable for a global company: learning fluent English. He has pushed them to use English in internal meetings, people close to him said.
His last major public appearance came weeks before he stepped down in 2021, at an all-hands company speech. He said the documentary “Free Solo,” about a rock-climber’s rope-free ascent of a peak in Yosemite National Park, taught him to focus on the present.
“Originally, I could only swim 500 meters, but now I can easily swim up to 1,000 meters, not because my physical ability has improved, but because, I feel, I have removed the hesitation in the middle,” he said. “I stopped worrying about whether I could finish the swim.”
