Do we like them?Do we like Zhang Yiming?
Our score: 5 out of 10. No harmful words of his own turned up and his giving is real, but the record on his views is thin and Douyin's rules are a worry.
Zhang Yiming is the founder of ByteDance, the company behind TikTok and its Chinese sister app Douyin. In January 2026 Forbes had him overtaking Nongfu Spring's Zhong Shanshan as China's richest person, and Hurun's October list put him back on top with a record fortune. There's not much gossip about him as a person, because he's famously low-profile.
What we do have is his own voice from a March 2021 staff speech, translated on a tech blog. He defined an “ordinary mind” as “when hungry, eat; when tired, sleep.” He also told staff “Ordinary people can do extraordinary things.” It reads like a founder keen to dial down the hype, not a culture warrior.
The legal and rumour side is mostly about the company. In 2023 a former ByteDance executive sued in the US, alleging a “culture of lawlessness” and that a Chinese government-controlled committee had “supreme access” to company data. ByteDance called the claims baseless. The report didn't accuse Zhang personally. In 2025 Douyin denied a Singapore newspaper report that he had taken Singaporean citizenship; we didn't see a denial from Zhang himself.
In November 2024 Zhong Shanshan publicly demanded an apology from Zhang over Douyin's alleged role in spreading rumours and misinformation about him. ByteDance declined to comment and no response from Zhang was reported. Treat it as an unresolved grievance from a rival tycoon, not a finding of fact.
On the harm check, we found no statements from Zhang on LGBTQ people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate, and no pattern of platforming harm. IPVM reported in 2023 that Douyin's short-drama guidelines penalise content “promoting unhealthy and non-mainstream views on marriage and love”, wording it says is copied from a PRC government standard, and that a video of two men joking about a kiss was removed. ByteDance didn't respond to IPVM, and nothing we read ties those rules to Zhang personally. That's why it's a close call, not a pass or a fail.
The good stuff is real. In 2021 he gave 500 million yuan (about US$77 million) from his own wealth to an education fund in his hometown of Longyan, for teacher training, education technology and dormitories. In 2024 he and co-founder Liang Rubo jointly gave 200 million yuan to Nankai University, their alma mater, for mathematical research and talent development.