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September 17, 2026, 10:24 AM ET
Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok parent company ByteDance, is now richer than any other person in Asia.VCG / Contributor / Getty Images
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Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok parent company ByteDance, has just overtaken Indian tycoon Gautam Adani as the richest person in Asia, according to Bloomberg, who currently boasts a net worth of $104.8 billion.
Despite regulatory hurdles that nearly shut down one of his most popular apps in the U.S., TikTok, Zhang’s fortune has swelled to a whopping $105.5 billion.
Zhang, who owns around 21% of his company, saw his net worth skyrocket $12 billion this month alone following new valuations from BlackRock and Fidelity.
Now, his riches are nearly eight times greater than the $13 billion he had to his name in 2019—when Bloomberg first began monitoring his net worth. And AI has been one of the biggest wealth drivers.
How AI helped TikTok’s founder become even richer: ‘He plays his cards right’
The Chinese billionaire won out on the AI boom by taking big swings at the right time.
Zhang developed ByteDance’s AI technology in the midst of the U.S.-TikTok standoff; and Bloomberg reporting said that the company can leverage data from its social media apps to train its AI models. These advanced tech products may be the business’ biggest growth engines aside from the success of its video platform, boasting over a billion of daily active TikTok users, and hundreds of millions of people on Douyin.
“He plays his cards right,” Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at research firm Omdia, told Bloomberg. “He stayed on course and then continued to double down on AI investment.”
Zhang’s rise is one of many examples of how AI is reshaping the billionaire ranks—creating new fortunes, and rapidly growing the wealth of some of the world’s richest people.
AI is minting new billionaires and sending net worths soaring
The world’s richest entrepreneurs have watched their net worths skyrocket and plummet at the whim of the stock market. And just like Zhang, Michael Dell—the founder and CEO of pioneering tech company Dell Technologies—nearly doubled his wealth in just one year thanks to the AI boom. Now, he’s the fifth richest man in the world.
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The 61-year-old entrepreneur, who owns 40% of his tech company, has gained around $122 billion since this month in 2025, nearly doubling his wealth to a whopping $262 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
During its Q1 fiscal 2027 financial results earlier this year, Dell reported better-than-expected quarterly adjusted earnings, which has more than tripled from the year before as AI-optimized server revenue rocketed 757% to $16.1 billion. That helped Dell shoot past Zuckerberg on the billionaires list.
The innovation—seen as an improvement from Gemini 2.5 released around eight months ago—ignited optimism from investors and analysts, causing Alphabet stock to jump 3%. And in the months since, his investments have only continued to pay off, with Page’s net worth swelling to $293 billion today. Now, he’s the second richest person in the world, per Bloomberg’s estimate.
And AI isn’t just accelerating the wealth of established bigwigs—it’s also adding young newcomers to the billionaire club.
Last year the number of self-made billionaires under 30 hit an all-time high, according to an analysis from Forbes.
The majority made their wealth by jumping on the AI industry while it’s hot. For example, 25-year-old Sualeh Asif found success as the creator of company Anysphere—the team behind popular $29.3 billion AI editing tool Cursor. And Gen Zers Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha hit ten figures in cofounding Mercor: an AI-powered recruiting startup helping connect talent with Silicon Valley’s biggest AI labs.
Of the 11 young entrepreneurs who became billionaires analyzed, eight saw their fortunes boom through their AI innovations.
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About the Author
By Emma BurleighReporter, Success
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Emma Burleigh is a reporter at Fortune, covering success, careers, entrepreneurship, and personal finance. Before joining the Success desk, she co-authored Fortune’s CHRO Daily newsletter, extensively covering the workplace and the future of jobs. Emma has also written for publications including the Observer and The China Project, publishing long-form stories on culture, entertainment, and geopolitics. She has a joint-master’s degree from New York U
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