Since launching in 2016, TikTok, a wildly popular short-video app used mainly by teens and 20-somethings, has “spawned its own industry”, creating a new generation of social-media stars and handing an estimated $33bn fortune to Zhang Yiming – the 37-year-old software engineer who founded its parent company, ByteDance, says The Sunday Times. It has also become “a political tool” capable of humiliating the US president. Ahead of his campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last month, Donald Trump bragged about receiving “1m RSVPs” – only to be confronted with rows of empty seats, notes CNN. “Many of those who asked for tickets” appear to have been “trolling the president – in a stunt organised mainly through TikTok”.
Riling the American president
Washington is now threatening a crackdown, indicating it may follow India’s example and ban Chinese social-media apps, including TikTok, on security grounds. You should only download TikTok, secretary of state Mike Pompeo warned Americans this week, “if you want your private information in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party”. Zhang and his company are adamant that Beijing has no influence on its operation, notes the Financial Times. But in the current tense environment, keeping “both the US and China happy sounds like one impossible dance routine”. Does he have the mettle to pull it off?
Some reckon that TikTok’s “light-hearted nonsense” disguises “the blindingly ambitious designs of one man bent on changing the world”, says The Sunday Times. Born in 1983, the son of civil servants, Zhang has always been a man on the move. Cutting his teeth after university at a series of tech start-ups, Zhang briefly joined Microsoft in China before setting up his own company, ByteDance, from an apartment in Beijing in 2012. Its first product, the news aggregation app Toutiao, was powered by “recommendation algorithms” tracking users’ behaviour across thousands of sites. TikTok (named Douyin in the Chinese market), which followed in 2016, deployed much the same technology. Data analyst CB Insights describes ByteDance’s algorithms as its “secret sauce”. Others reckon Zhang is peddling spyware. According to Reddit’s boss, Steve Huffman, the company’s ability to track users’ behaviour around the web is “truly terrifying”.
Subscribe to MoneyWeek
Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE
Sign up to Money Morning
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter
Boundless ambitions
One thing that’s certain is that Zhang is “a tough taskmaster” with a strange way of enforcing creativity and discipline, says The Sunday Times. “He requires executives to make their own TikTok videos” and “if their creations don’t obtain a sufficient number of ‘likes’, makes them do press-ups.” Employees are barred from talking to the press and Zhang himself rarely does interviews. In a rare outing last year, he hinted at his drive: “We must work harder, we must also be more perfectionist”. And indeed, his “ambitions seem boundless”. TikTok has turned ByteDance into “the world’s most valuable start-up” (its value is estimated to have doubled in a year to around $140bn) and the company seems to have plenty more in reserve, including 20 other apps and a smartphone.
When Zhang recently poached a top Disney executive, Kevin Mayer, to run the show in America, he observed his empire was heading “to the next level”. It was a shrewd PR move, but events are moving quickly – and that boast is now hanging in the balance.
-
Why Chinese stocks are so far out of favourThere’s little appetite for Chinese stocks despite low valuations.
-
The 62 UK areas where you could be priced out of using your Lifetime ISASaving for your first home in Croydon, Ealing, Brent or any one of these other locations? You could be at risk of being priced out of using your Lifetime ISA
-
Deepseek's Liang Wenfeng: the maths whizz who shook Big TechFew people had heard of Liang Wenfeng until the launch of his DeepSeek AI chatbot wiped a trillion dollars off US technology stocks. His pivot to AI was of a piece with his past exploits.
-
Donald Trump's tariffs spark a global game of thronesWe don’t know what Donald Trump intends or will do next. That is in itself damaging.
-
RedNote: the rise of the new TikTokRedNote, a Chinese rival to social-media app TikTok, has seen millions of US users flock to it in the wake of the US TikTok ban. That caught the company by surprise. What is RedNote and can its popularity last?
-
Australian tycoon Andrew Forrest battles it out with oil giant ExxonMobilIron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest made billions before committing himself to philanthropy. Now he is preparing for a showdown with ExxonMobil.
-
Remembering Sir David McMurtry: Renishaw founder and Concorde engineerSir David McMurtry, co-founder of Renishaw, made a unique contribution to Britain. We look back at his legacy
-
Low Tuck Kwong: the Indonesian mining billionaire who is benefitting from coal boomLow Tuck Kwong’s coal business was in deep trouble a decade ago with no future. Now, he is riding the waves of a global coal boom
-
David Montgomery's potential new ally as he seeks to buy The TelegraphVeteran media mogul David Montgomery has seen off a bid for his media group National World. But he now has his eye on The Telegraph
-
Elon Musk to Taylor Swift - the four key figures who moved markets in 2024We look at the four most influential people in 2024 who moved markets – from Elon Musk reshaping US politics to Rachel Reeves struggling as Britain's chancellor
