Meet Zhang Yiming, the secretive Chinese billionaire

behind TikTok who made over $12 billion in 2018 and

called Trump's demands to sell the app 'unreasonable'

The widespread popularity of TikTok has not just created a new generation of social
media stars, it's also created a social media billionaire.

Zhang Yiming, the 36-year-old software engineer who founded the app's parent
company, now has a net worth of $16.2 billion, Forbes estimates. Despite being one of
the wealthiest people in China as ranked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zhang is
extremely private and little is known about his personal life.

Keep reading to learn everything we know about Zhang Yiming.

Zhang, 36, lives in Beijing, China.

VCG/VCG via Getty Images

Zhang was born in 1983 in China's Fujian province, according to
the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Zhang's parents worked as civil
servants, Bloomberg reported.

His name is based on a Chinese proverb about "surprising everyone

with a first attempt," according to the South China Morning Post.
He married his college sweetheart.

Nankai University is located in Tianjin, north China. Zhang

Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images

Zhang graduated from Nankai University in 2005, where he started off

studying microelectronics before switching his major to software
engineering, the South China Morning Post reported.

The couple does not have any children, according to the South China
Morning Post.
Zhang's first job out of college was at a digital travel booking startup called Kuxun.

ByteDance founder & CEO Yiming Zhang. Inspirasiku TV/YouTube

"I was one of first employees. And I was an ordinary engineer at the
beginning, but in the second year, I was in charge of about 40 to 50
people responsible for back-end technology and other tasks related to
products," Zhang told ByteDance employees, according to the South
China Morning Post.

Zhang credits that job for teaching him sales skills that he later used to
grow ByteDance.

"I remember that at the end of 2007, I went to meet the client with the
sales director," Zhang said, according to the Post. "This experience let
me know what sales are good sales. When I established Toutiao and
recruited staff, these examples helped me a lot."
Zhang also worked at Microsoft before founding ByteDance, the South
China Morning Post reported.
Zhang founded TikTok's parent company in 2012.

The headquarters of Beijing Bytedance Technology Co Ltd, in Beijing,

China. Reuters/Stringer

The company is now worth $75 billion, according

to Pitchbook, making it the most valuable privately held company in
the world.

The company owns several social networking apps that operate within
China, Business Insider previously reported. The company released a
WeChat rival called FlipChat, and a video-messaging app called
Duoshan in 2019.