Zhang Yiming built a $16.2 billion fortune after founding ByteDance, the Chinese software developer behind TikTok. "We push information, not by queries, [but] by news recommendation. After failing an entrance exam three times, he went on to attend the Hangzhou Teacher’s Institute and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English.Ma noticed the potential of the internet in the mid-90s and went on to play with different ideas and how they could be utilized.

A TikTok spokesman said the videos removed represent less than 1pc of all content on the app.The report said 24.8pc of the clips removed were “depicting harmful, dangerous, or illegal behavior by minors, like alcohol or drug use, as well as more serious content we take immediate action to remove.” Another 15.6pc “violated our suicide, self-harm, and dangerous acts policy".The uncomfortable truth for Zhang is that the only way to end persistent worries about TikTok is to cede control over it.“The only permanent solution would be to spin off the overseas entity as a completely separate entity, with an overseas majority shareholder, so that the Chinese parent company has no legal control over it,” says Rich Bishop, the chief executive of.Senior executives at Bytedance are discussing options such as creating new headquarters outside of Beijing and a new management board at TikTok to distance the company from China, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.But for now, at least, Zhang has a different route in mind for his company: Going public.“Currently the IPO is not pressing and we don’t have any imminent plans,” Zhang said earlier this year. Posting at 4am on the Chinese social network WeChat, Zhang Yiming confessed that he was "filled with remorse and guilt, entirely unable to sleep".His company Bytedance, he explained, had undermined "socialist core values", failed to respect the "guidance" of China's powerful state censors and betrayed a "weak" understanding of the theories of China's leader, Xi Jinping,"All along, we have placed excessive emphasis on the role of technology, and we have not acknowledged that technology must be led by the socialist core value system," he wrote. ".That strategy of picking users' content for them, freeing them from the burden of choice, was what supercharged TikTok's growth in the West.Called Douyin in China and aimed at young users, the app's first version was built in 200 days and had 100 million users within a year. The names of his other two children are not public yet. This makes the man the 33,Katarina Martinson – Family, Family Tree,Roman Avdeev — Life, Family, Business, Net Worth,David M. Overton – Chief Executive Officer Of The Cheesecake Factory. Find out more,The latest offers and discount codes from popular brands on Telegraph Voucher Codes,Zhang Yiming, the founder of viral video app TikTok’s $100bn (£79bn) parent company ByteDance, is now China’s tenth richest man with a personal wealth of $16.2bn,Zhang Yiming was forced to shut down ByteDance's first app,Disney executive Kevin Mayer has joined ByteDance as its chief operating officer,Merge Arm with Graphcore, says co-founder,UK to 'reset' sat nav plans after scrapping work on £5bn Galileo rival,Publicis calls on Google to avoid 2pc advertiser charge,Arm can still become a trillion-pound British tech colossus,Nvidia boss vows to protect Arm: 'It's a once in a generation company',Nvidia cash could boost Arm – but doubters have ‘sinking feeling’,TikTok boom Downloads during coronavirus are three times higher than nearest competitor Instagram,TikTok boom Net revenue during coronavirus has increased by 159%,high-profile Disney executive Kevin Mayer. ",Thirty eight-year-old Zhang, the founder of.Zhang announced in his 2018 WeChat apology that he would shut down ByteDance’s first app, a social network for jokes called Neihan Duanzi, after the Chinese government accused him of hosting “vulgar” content.In response, Zhang promised to increase the number of censors it employed to delete content and pledged to favour Communist Party members when hiring new employees.For Zhang, running the first Chinese app to seriously conquer the West is a curse as well as a blessing. "We are more like a search business or a social media platform," he said in 2018.

Ma was born on September 10, 1964 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang region of China. 20. Both companies have spent years furiously trying to lower that first hurdle.TikTok, however, just runs right through it, requiring no input before showing music videos and skits to its users. The privately held company raised fresh investment funds at a valuation of $75 billion in 2018. The app has grown to more than 260 million monthly users.Like many tech bosses, Zhang is adamant that Toutiao is "not a news business", but it's not a social network either. He graduated in 2005 with a degree in software engineering from Nankai University in the sprawling port city of Tianjin.

It has forced him to flatter two mutually hostile governments and to try to hold together an empire that spans two worlds.“Any Chinese entrepreneur with a growing product faces the dual pressures of conforming to Chinese law and staying in the good graces of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), while at the same time convincing those outside China that the company is independent of the Chinese government,” says Stanley Rosen, a professor of political science at the University of Southern California.Zhang’s life story could easily be that of any US founder.