As Elon Musk, the richest man, sees a decline of $135 billion to his net worth, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' fortune has also declined by $43 billion. ByteDance co-founder Zhang Yiming is adding to his riches, accounting for about a $14 billion increase to his net worth since the beginning of this year, which is a 31% hike. He is currently at $57.5 billion.

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The 41-year-old software engineer has leaped ahead of Tencent founder and CEO Pony Ma, becoming China's richest person. Ma's net worth of $56.5 billion has pushed him behind, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Yiming is now the third-richest person in Asia.

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The TikTok founder's net worth has increased by $10 billion after it analysed “the valuations from investors BlackRock Inc., Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price Group Inc. and the company’s plans to buy back employee stock at a valuation of $312 billion," as reported in the Bloomberg report.

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Who is Zhang Yiming?

This is viewed as a massive comeback by Yiming, as ByteDance's TikTok faced backlash from countries across the world, which led to the banning of the app. India, US, UK, Nepal, Netherlands and many other countries banned the video sharing app. This in turn brought not only bad publicity but also financial losses.

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The Beijing-based company ByteDance was founded in the year 2012; back in the day, it was in the confines of a four-bedroom apartment. It is the parent company of both social media app TikTok and news aggregator platform Toutiao. Yiming studied at Nankai University in Tianjin, where he majored in microelectronics engineering and software engineering.