ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming has overtaken Indian industrialist Gautam Adani to become Asia’s richest person, with a fortune above US$105 billion, NewsFirst reported on Wednesday, citing Bloomberg.
Zhang, 43, gained more than US$12 billion this month alone after Bloomberg revised ByteDance’s valuation using updated marks reported by investment firms including BlackRock, Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price. His wealth has risen more than eightfold from the US$13 billion Bloomberg first recorded for him in March 2019.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index applies a 10% risk discount to ByteDance because the company is privately held — meaning the figure is a valuation estimate, not a market price.
The two fortunes moved in opposite directions
Zhang did not simply climb past a stationary rival. Adani’s wealth reached US$120 billion in June and has fallen since, which NewsFirst attributes to a rebalancing of stocks within the MSCI index and a broader selloff driven by higher oil prices and bond yields.
That second factor is the one with a local read. The same rise in crude that pressured Adani’s energy-to-retail holdings has been driving selling on the Colombo Stock Exchange through September, where the ASPI has fallen for successive sessions.
A second move in three months
This is Zhang’s second advance up the Asian rankings this year. Sri Lankan outlets including Hiru News reported on 3 June that he had passed Mukesh Ambani into second place, with Adani still ahead. Three months later he is first. That June report is outside the citation window and is offered as background rather than as a source.
ByteDance’s growth now rests on more than TikTok. NewsFirst names the Doubao chatbot and the Seedance video-generation tool as the company’s AI products, and reports that ByteDance transferred parts of TikTok’s US operations to American investors earlier this year, ending a long period of regulatory uncertainty over the app’s future in that market.
Bloomberg’s framing, as relayed by NewsFirst, is that the AI boom is now generating fortunes large enough to overtake those built on traditional industry — Adani’s energy and retail empire and Ambani’s conglomerate among them.
Not reported
NewsFirst gives no current figure for Adani’s net worth, no valuation for ByteDance itself, and no revenue or profit figures for the company or its AI products. It does not say what proportion of TikTok’s US operations was transferred, to whom, or on what terms, and does not name the investment firms’ revised ByteDance marks.
The underlying report is Bloomberg’s, reached here through NewsFirst.
Update: two more outlets file, but not independently
The Daily Mirror’s international desk and Hiru News both carried the story later on Wednesday evening — the Daily Mirror at 8.20 p.m. and Hiru News the same evening, closing the gap noted above.
Neither adds reporting. Both run the same syndicated copy, credited by the Daily Mirror to The Indian Express, and the two texts are word-for-word identical to each other. They confirm the same three figures already reported — US$105 billion, the eightfold rise from US$13 billion in March 2019, and the Doubao and Seedance AI products — and attribute them to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
What they do not carry is everything that made NewsFirst’s account more informative: the US$12 billion monthly gain, the BlackRock, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price valuation marks, the 10 per cent private-company risk discount, Adani’s US$120 billion June peak, or the MSCI rebalancing. Three outlets have now published the story, but only one of the three did any reporting on it, and the questions listed above remain unanswered.
