Over at the corner coffee shops these days, everyone’s talking about the big news: ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming is now the richest man in Asia. At just 43 years old, his net worth has surged past $105 billion. Local media point out that the explosive growth of anything tied to artificial intelligence has pushed him right past the old-school billionaires whose fortunes were built on mining and oil.
Looking back, his rise has been like a rocket launch. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, when they first started tracking him in 2019, he was sitting at around $13 billion. In the blink of an eye, that’s multiplied more than seven times over. Sometimes it is hard to wrap your head around how digital businesses rake in that kind of money.
People around town are even joking about fellow Fujian natives who made it big in tech, drawing comparisons between two heavyweights: one headed up to Beijing and became the new richest man in Asia, while the other bounced around Cambodia before ending up in a detention center in Beijing's Dongcheng district. In this day and age, striking it rich or ending up behind bars can come down to just a split-second choice.
