Adani loses Asia’s richest person tag to ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming has overtaken Gautam Adani to become Asia’s richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as the Chinese technology group’s valuation rises on the back of TikTok and a growing artificial intelligence business.

Zhang’s fortune has climbed above $105 billion, putting him ahead of Adani and making the 43-year-old ByteDance co-founder the richest person in Asia for the first time. Bloomberg began tracking his wealth in March 2019, when it put his fortune at about $13 billion.

The change at the top of Asia’s wealth rankings follows a sharp rise in the value investors assign to privately held ByteDance.

The company remains best known internationally for TikTok, but AI has become a much larger part of its business. Its Doubao chatbot has more than 300 million monthly users and has become China’s most popular AI assistant, while ByteDance has expanded into video generation, enterprise AI and cloud services.

ByteDance’s annualized AI revenue has reached about $4 billion, the South China Morning Post reported, citing people familiar with the business, putting it ahead of publicly known figures for Chinese rivals. The company has also been reorganizing its Lark workplace software and Volcano Engine cloud businesses around AI products and services.

The company is spending heavily to keep pace. ByteDance recently secured a $29.6 billion loan from nearly 30 banks, with much of the funding expected to support AI chips, data centers and other infrastructure.

Its revenue rose more than 30% in the first half of 2026 to about $120 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported. Net profit fell to about $20 billion as AI investment weighed on earnings. ByteDance generated roughly $200 billion in revenue in 2025.

Zhang stepped down as ByteDance chief executive in 2021 and later gave up the chairmanship, but remains one of its largest shareholders.

His rise has come quickly. In June, Zhang moved past Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani to become Asia’s second-richest person, with a fortune of $92.8 billion. Three months later, he has moved ahead of Adani.

Adani’s wealth had climbed to about $120 billion earlier this year before falling back in recent months, according to Bloomberg reporting. His fortune remains tied largely to listed businesses spanning ports, power, airports, commodities and infrastructure.

The contrast with Zhang is pronounced. Much of Zhang’s wealth comes from a private technology company whose value has been lifted by social media, advertising and increasingly AI.

To be sure, ByteDance is privately held, so Zhang’s net worth cannot be tracked in the same way as the fortune of a founder whose main holdings trade publicly. Bloomberg’s estimate depends on private-market transactions, institutional investor marks and other valuation inputs. ByteDance itself has also raised the internal value of its restricted stock units this year, while private transactions have produced varying implied valuations for the company.

That means Zhang’s ranking can move sharply when investors revise what they think ByteDance is worth, even without a public share price changing from day to day.

The latest shift nevertheless shows how much value investors are assigning to ByteDance’s AI push. Doubao has become a major consumer product in China, Seedance has pushed the company deeper into generative video, and ByteDance is spending heavily on the computing infrastructure needed to compete with both Chinese and US AI groups.

The company has also begun pushing AI deeper into its enterprise products. In August, it launched Doubao Work, an agent designed to break down tasks, use software tools and execute workflows, including through ByteDance’s Lark workplace platform.

Zhang’s move past Adani puts a Chinese technology founder back at the top of Asia’s wealth rankings after a period dominated by Indian industrialists.