Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, closed out one of the most closely watched corporate ownership disputes in recent technology history on January 22, 2026, when TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC — the new entity operating TikTok’s U.S. business — officially came into existence. Under the divestiture agreement Zhang’s ByteDance signed on December 18, 2025, American and global investors led by Oracle, Silver Lake, and the Gulf-backed investment fund MGX collectively took roughly 80.1% ownership of the joint venture, while ByteDance itself retained about 19.9%. The deal resolved a years-long standoff over U.S. legislation that had threatened to ban TikTok outright unless its American operations were separated from Chinese ownership, and it followed a September 2025 announcement from President Trump confirming an agreement had been reached in principle.
Notably, the structure of the deal preserved something Zhang and ByteDance had fought hard to protect throughout the negotiations: rather than selling TikTok’s underlying recommendation algorithm to the new joint venture outright, ByteDance instead licenses it to the entity — an arrangement that satisfied U.S. legal requirements for divestiture while keeping ByteDance’s most commercially sensitive technology under its own continued control. That licensing structure has continued to draw scrutiny from some U.S. lawmakers, who have questioned whether it fully achieves the separation from Chinese ownership and algorithmic influence that the original legislation was intended to secure.
Losing a US Business While Gaining a Fortune
Despite ceding majority ownership of TikTok’s American operations, Zhang’s personal wealth continued climbing through 2026, driven primarily by ByteDance’s continued growth in its core short-video businesses (TikTok internationally and Douyin in China) and by the rapid rise of Doubao, ByteDance’s AI chatbot and assistant, which has become one of the most widely used AI products in China. By June 2026, Zhang’s net worth had reached approximately $92.8 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him not just China’s richest person for a second consecutive year but also, briefly, Asia’s second-richest individual, overtaking Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani. His wealth has grown more than sevenfold since Bloomberg began tracking it in March 2019, when he was worth roughly $13 billion — a trajectory that closely tracks ByteDance’s own transformation from a Chinese news-aggregation and short-video startup into one of the most valuable privately held technology companies in the world, reportedly valued at around $550 billion in a proposed 2026 sale of employee shares.
A Founder Who Stepped Back From Titles But Not From Control
Zhang stepped down from ByteDance’s chairman role in 2021, part of a broader pattern among Chinese technology founders of that era relinquishing formal day-to-day titles while retaining outsized influence over their companies’ strategic direction. Despite holding only around 21% of ByteDance’s equity, Zhang has retained supervoting control through the company’s dual-class share structure, meaning his actual decision-making authority over ByteDance’s direction — including its AI strategy and its handling of the TikTok divestiture negotiations — has remained effectively undiminished by his more limited formal role. Zhang founded ByteDance in 2012, originally building the company around Toutiao, an AI-driven news aggregation app, before Douyin (2016) and its international counterpart TikTok (2017) became the company’s dominant products.
Doubao as ByteDance’s Next Growth Engine
With TikTok’s U.S. business now majority-owned by outside investors, ByteDance’s own growth story has increasingly centered on Doubao, its consumer AI assistant, which has scaled rapidly inside China’s competitive AI chatbot market alongside rivals from Alibaba, Tencent, and DeepSeek. ByteDance has continued investing heavily in the underlying large language models powering Doubao, positioning AI as the company’s next major growth vector at a moment when its most famous product, TikTok, faces a more constrained ownership structure in its largest advertising market outside China.
A Notably Private Public Figure
Even as his wealth and ByteDance’s global reach have grown dramatically, Zhang has remained one of the more publicly reclusive major Chinese technology founders, rarely granting interviews or making high-profile public appearances compared with peers like Alibaba’s Jack Ma or Tencent’s Pony Ma. That relative silence has persisted even through the multi-year TikTok ownership dispute that placed ByteDance and its founder at the center of sustained U.S. political and media attention, with ByteDance’s public-facing negotiations largely handled by other company executives and legal representatives rather than Zhang himself appearing directly in the spotlight.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
TikTok remains one of the most widely used social and commerce platforms in the Philippines, and the new U.S. ownership structure for its American operations does not directly affect how the app functions for Filipino users or how TikTok Shop operates regionally — but the deal is a concrete case study for Philippine founders and investors on how geopolitical pressure can force a rapid restructuring of even a company’s most valuable consumer product without destroying its underlying value. Filipino creators, brands, and TikTok Shop sellers who depend heavily on the platform for reach and sales should also watch ByteDance’s parallel investment in Doubao and AI-driven content tools closely, since features first tested in ByteDance’s Chinese products have historically migrated to TikTok’s international version within a matter of months.
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