Zhang Yiming: TikTok’s tech boss

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Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Every episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

Then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Zing Sing and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

I'm Simon Jack.

I'm the BBC's business editor.

And on this episode, we have one of the richest people in the world whose name you might not be familiar with, but whose product you almost certainly will be.

You say almost certainly will.

It is TikTok.

And I have to confess that I am not a TikTok subscriber.

I don't have it on my phone, but I'm going to download it right now.

I will start my TikTok journey.

during this podcast.

And I think the billionaire creator Zhang Yiming, the man behind TikTok, will be very happy to hear he signed up another customer.

So while Simon is downloading the app for the very first time, let's quickly go over Zhang Yiming in numbers.

So he's 41 years old and he's currently worth a very cool $43 billion.

Now, this makes him the second or third richest person in China, depending on the day you're looking it up.

He founded a tech company Byte Dance, which I have heard of because it became very politically sensitive in the US.

ByteDance makes apps, including TikTok.

ByteDance has also been called the world's most valuable startup because it makes TikTok, which also has over a billion users worldwide and a new one.

Okay, so listen, whilst I'm downloading it, you tell me about TikTok.

What's it all about?

So TikTok, for those of you who have been living under a rock,

is one of those social media apps that has exploded in popularity over the last few years.

So it really took off during the pandemic when everyone was locked at home just scrolling through their phone.

And what it is, is basically a never-ending news feed of videos.

Videos from all over the world, from all sorts of different users.

You don't even really need to be following anyone for your feed to be populated with videos that TikTok thinks you will like.

And it turns out that TikTok is very good at knowing what you'll like.

We'll discuss its super powerful algorithm later on in this episode.

So in a way, this is a story about the power of AI, the power of algorithms, social media, how they keep our attention, how they drain our attention, how they shorten our attention.

Yes, and I actually do think there is an argument you could mount for TikTok dramatically reducing my attention span and the attention span of people that I know.

It's also super addictive and super creative, some would say.

So, young people really love it.

You know, the reason why it's become so successful is because people are just pumping content into it non-stop, and the algorithm is very good at serving it to people.

Okay, the first thing that's offered up to me is

choose my interests.

So, comedy, animals, fashion accessories, definitely know for that one.

Pop culture, yep.

DIY and life hacks, let's go for that one.

Okay, but the person behind it is the thing we are discussing today.

So, Zhang Yiming apparently lives a very private life.

He's not a very flashy individual.

No, we actually don't have that much information about how he spends his time and money.

Oh, hang on a second.

Sorry about that.

Hang on.

See, TikTok just launches you straight in there.

Okay.

So we do know that Zhang's a big admirer of Mark Zuckerberg.

At one point, he even styled himself like him by purchasing 99 t-shirts and wearing a new one every day for 99 days.

Presumably, this is some kind of life hack to save time.

Mark Zuckerberg, of course, founder of Facebook and now Meta, which owns WhatsApp.

It owns, what's the other one again?

Instagram, of course.

And we've already done him on our billionaire podcast.

So have a listen to that one if you haven't heard it yet.

But unlike Mark Zuckerberg, who's kept an iron grip on the company he founded, Zhang stepped down from the company he founded.

In his last speech at the company, he said, Some media want to add drama when they report on startups and people's stories by making experience seem legendary or dramatizing people's characters.

I often said it was nothing special.

We're very similar to one another.

We're all ordinary people.

If you give an ordinary mind, accept yourself as you are, and do well for yourself, you can often do things well.

Ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

So, ordinary people, not really why we're here.

Yeah, maybe he's very humble, maybe he's modest, maybe he's just downplaying it, but is he really such an ordinary guy?

And more importantly, is he good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Let's go back to the start.

Zhang Yiming was born in 1983 in Fujian province, which is a kind of southeast region on the coast in China.

He was the only child of civil servants.

His mother was a nurse.

His father worked for the city's Science and Technology Commission.

So he grew up in a kind of scientific family.

As a kid, he heard his dad talk about the latest technology at the dinner table, and that kind of gave him the dream of being a scientist when he grew up.

He was a voracious reader.

He read magazines in kindergarten, apparently.

By the time he was a teenager, he was reading around 25 newspapers a week.

I reckon I've got that beat, but I'm not a teenager.

Yeah, I mean, you'd have to be a pretty big nerd to be reading 25 newspapers a week in your teens.

But he was clearly very hungry for knowledge.

And actually, he said before, if I could have accessed Wikipedia and YouTube, I would be so much smarter than I am now.

In 2001, when he had to choose a university, Zhang had a really specific set of criteria.

So first off, the university obviously had to be good and well respected.

He wanted to remain in China, but it had to be far away from his parents so they couldn't visit and chastise him if he got bad results.

Very clever.

It also had to be gender balanced because he wanted to find a girlfriend.

And it had to have snow in winter because he'd never seen it before.

Also, it had to be near the coast because he wanted to eat good seafood.

So all in all, quite the shopping list.

This at least feels like AI parameters for what Li might be interested in.

So it turns out that in China, the only university that fits all these criteria is somewhere called Nankai University in Tianzhen, which is a port city.

Yeah, he wanted to study biology, but didn't get the grades needed, so he ended up doing software engineering.

Who knew you need better grades to do biology than software engineering?

But of course, this change in plans gave him the opportunity to, as he puts it, apply textbook theory to real-life applications.

He described his first years at university as lonely and boring.

He didn't like playing games or drinking like his classmates and he didn't want to join clubs or group activities.

But he did create a very lucrative sideline in fixing his fellow students' computers and this actually became the stuff of his first business.

Yeah it earned him between two to three thousand yuan a month which is around two hundred and fifty to three hundred and sixty dollars which is quite a lot of money for a student at that time.

And for someone who was relatively unsociable it also helped him to meet people because he'd be able to say hi I installed your computer.

And crucially, it introduced him to his girlfriend, a woman called Liu Ten, when he fixed a computer and she is now his wife.

So, the root to the woman's heart is fixing her computer.

Depends on how badly your computer runs, but sure.

He also became close to his roommate, Liang Rubo, and they shared a computer, they programmed together, they played badminton at weekends, and he's still around.

He's currently CEO of Byte Dance.

So, there were two key partners at university that he met: one romantic, one business.

And in 2005, after graduating, Zhang spends a few years in the tech industry.

Yeah, first he tried to start a software company with two school friends.

They weren't able to market it successfully.

It quickly failed.

Then he joined a new tech startup called Kushan.

Within months, he went from engineer to managing 50 people.

He ended up leaving that company to join Microsoft's Asian research lab in Beijing, but there he only lasted a few months.

Yeah, he found the work so unchallenging, he says, that he spent half his time reading books, including biographies of entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and guides like Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

And I'm so ineffective, I've never read that book.

I'm sure Microsoft will also be thrilled to know that the founder of Byte Dance found their work in Beijing completely unstimulating.

So on leaving, he briefly joined something called Fan Fu, a Twitter-style social media site, but that was shut down temporarily in 2009 due to censorship of websites by the Chinese government after the government claimed that rioting in the city of Urumqi was organized online.

Interesting.

Now this is even more interesting because Zhang actually blogged about those restrictions at the time and he said, go out and wear a t-shirt supporting Google.

If you block the internet, I'll write what I want to say on my clothes.

Brave.

Yeah, pretty rebellious.

Yeah, but he's about to be headhunted by an investor who is going to change his life.

Now, this is a story about mobile apps like TikTok.

So let's do a little bit of context setting at this point.

Yes, in 2007, Apple had just released the first iPhone and Zhang said, I was shocked when I bought it.

I could build a website, I could write a program on it.

And by 2011, China surpassed the US to become the world's biggest smartphone market with just under a billion smartphone users.

And the rise of smartphones completely revolutionized how users received information in China.

So people were moving away from desktop computers to cell phones.

But, you know, at this point, these apps operating on smartphones, they weren't great.

Yeah, it's also probably important to note that newspapers, radio, television are and were regulated by the Chinese government.

But the government was not so good at regulating the huge number of sites appearing on the internet.

They weren't quite at the races when it came to regulating that.

And one day Zhang was watching commuters in Beijing completely absorbed by their phones and he had this kind of light bulb moment.

He said, I noticed that fewer and fewer people were reading newspapers on subways.

I thought smartphones could replace newspapers to become the most important medium of information distribution.

So he decided to start a mobile news app.

At which point I'm going to give you a news flash because I have successfully downloaded TikTok.

Excellent.

I'm scrolling, I'm swiping up rather than left or right.

Someone is filming their luggage coming around a carousel at an airport.

Fascinating.

I feel like maybe TikTok hasn't quite nailed your interest yet.

Well, I've only been on 10 minutes, so basically the algorithm hasn't quite got into my brain yet.

No,

got it.

Keep scrolling.

Keep scrolling, man.

I'll talk about the investor who basically changed Zhang's life.

So now we're back to 2009 and Zhang's been head-hunted by this investor called Joan Wang.

And she remembers him being this top engineer from Kushan and she persuades him to come be a CEO at a new sister startup called 99fang.com, which is essentially a real estate search engine.

She was right in her instincts because after two years of running the company's chief executive, 99fang.com was the largest real estate search site in China.

But one day Zhang asks Joan to meet him for a coffee and they talk about AI and Zhang's idea for this news aggregation app.

He maps it all out in a napkin.

And Joan is actually very understanding of her colleagues' moonshot idea.

She writes to her colleagues at the investment company saying that Zhang seeks their understanding and permission to leave 99 Fang and start his new company.

But she puts some money where her mouth is as well.

She made 80,000 US dollar angel investment in the new company.

So in March 2012, Zhang officially co-founded a new company called Bite Dance, which we know today, with his old university pal and badminton partner, Yang Rubo.

They rent a four-bedroom apartment and they live and they work on Bite Dance's various apps.

That's so typical of the kind of tech bro kind of scene, isn't it?

They all sort of live in the same house together.

I know, I really shudder to think what the bathroom looks like.

But in the real world of finance, they had raised $5 million.

$3 million came from Jones Investment Company SIG Asia.

The rest coming from Chinese venture capitalists and some from Zhang himself.

Now, it's not clear exactly how much he invested personally, but he sold his own apartment to contribute, which means he's probably not a millionaire yet.

But he has just set up ByteDance, the company that will go on to make him billions.

Selling your apartment and putting all the money in, you know, that's a ballsy move.

Yeah, essentially moving in with your colleagues.

Yeah, you're sacrificing your personal life for your business life.

What kind of person does that?

So he rarely does interviews.

He's very private.

There's actually, however, a video of him and Liang visiting the apartment they used as an office you kind of get a sense of how mild-mannered and unassuming he is he's in this kind of zip-up hoodie with middle-aged dad glasses i mean he looks more like someone picking you up from gym class than a billionaire tech entrepreneur and he's been described as a gentleman down to earth nerdy and unintimidating not your typical billionaire that we've come across but he has also been described as coldly analytical and rational and pragmatic.

So those are slightly more billionaire traits, I'd say.

And we are in China, so he was running the company, like many Chinese companies, on this 996 culture.

That means staff are expected to work 9 a.m.

to 9 p.m.

six days a week, but are often encouraged to work outside those hours too.

And those extreme work hours clearly paid off because at Byte Dance, they quickly released over 12 different apps, continuously testing what worked and what failed.

And this includes his idea for the news aggregation app, which he calls Totiao.

And it pulls from various sources across the internet internet into a single feed sort of like Google or Apple News.

But he could see that there were too many news sources for people to really know what they wanted.

He felt they would have a unique product if an algorithm could order the stories for users based on their interests.

Yeah, things are starting to sound very familiar at this point.

So the key to this algorithm was going to be personal recommendation using artificial intelligence.

Now, Dang had been following the development of AI in the West.

He'd actually blogged that it was the future, but he was actually struggling to learn anything about it.

Yeah, AI was, well, it's pretty much still in its infancy.

There wasn't very much information available, especially in Chinese.

He had to scour the internet for any information he could find.

In fact, he tried to get an advanced copy of a book on AI that was due to be published in China, but the author said no.

But funnily enough, he would later go on to actually work for Byte Dance.

I'm sure that person must be thanking their lucky stars that they didn't anger Zhang too much by saying no initially.

But Zhang basically absorbed everything that he could about AI.

and within six months of founding ByteDance, they were able to release their first personalized recommendation system for Totiao.

Yeah, it learned from its users' reading habits, what they tended to click on, how long they stayed there to drive recommendations and they started hiring new AI experts from some of their competitors.

All this meant that by the end of 2012 they had one million daily users.

But there was a lot of competition because there were other news porters like NetEase and Soho, which had 200 million users.

And Totiao had faced more than 100 lawsuits from newspapers, other content makers who claim their content was used without permission.

This is obviously in our world of journalism, this is a big deal, right?

Exactly.

And in a few cases, Byte Dance actually had to pay content creators for using their work.

Yeah, and even while Byte Dance apps were growing in popularity, Zhang struggled to find new investors.

Yeah, Joan introduced him to at least 20 Chinese venture capitalists.

No one was interested.

They were apparently very unimpressed by Zhang.

they thought he was too young and maud manners not like that confident outgoing entrepreneurs that they were used to okay quick pick stop can i go back to my tick tock feed yes let's see what they've learned okay this is interesting this is this is some comment i can really get behind they've got a pick someone going down the m4 past heathrow airport and they've got a a big sign up saying slow down speed limit for air quality and the comment is only in london could they impose a 60 mile an hour speed limit for air quality on a motorway running next to the world's busiest dual runway airport I'm liking that.

Yep, TikTok's now got, what, a hit rate of one out of four or three for you?

Yeah.

Because I lingered quite a long time because we were chatting, they'll push a lot of air travel related stuff my way.

Exactly, or car stuff.

Okay.

Anyway, after failing with Chinese venture capitalists, they put out the idea to global investors and finally one agreed to a meeting, a man called Yuri Milner.

So he's definitely someone we need to do on this podcast because he is an Israeli-Russian billionaire who's been called the world's most successful investor in social media.

We definitely need to put him on the list.

Yeah, at one point he earned 8% of Facebook, 5% of Twitter.

The New York Times has reported he gets hundreds of millions directly from the Kremlin.

We cannot confirm or deny that.

So clearly, a man with quite a lot of geopolitical intrigue attached to him.

But either way, Zhang impressed him because Yuri understood the potential of this algorithm for social media.

So Yuri invested in the company, raising £10 million along with Joan Wang, he's one of his first investors, company SIG Asia.

Do you think that investment from Yuri is worth more than just the money?

It's about the kind of credibility and reputation that comes attached to someone like that.

I think that's true.

I think that if you, for example, get the blessing of some of the tech gods, like Sequoia Capital, for example, or Andreessen Horowitz and people like that, these are people who have successfully made billions out of investing in the companies of the future.

If they give you their blessing, that means you do have a certain amount of credibility.

You have a sort of aura about you because these are the smartest people in the world and they've decided they want to be on your team.

So it's kind of unclear how much money at this point Dang had personally, but Byte Downs was valued at $60 million in 2013.

So safe to say he's probably a millionaire at this point.

Yep, millionaire, well done.

But he's got quite a few failures ahead of him before he reaches that magical billion to be on our list.

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Now, remember, at this point, he still hasn't yet created TikTok, but he has this news app, Totiao, which is doing okay.

But he's in a competitive field.

Everyone's trying to be the next big app.

They've seen fortunes made in this space.

So Zhang understands that to stand out in a crowded market, he needs to make a product that people really love.

So he poaches a new vice president of technology for a competitor who came along and instigated a technical upgrade.

And soon more engineers were jumping ship to join them.

So this rise in the quality of the app persuaded more users to get on board, which persuaded more venture capitalists to invest in bite dance.

So by 2014, it was valued at half a billion, but still not quite there yet.

Yeah, the money is following the users, but Zhang now decides he wants to take ByteDance global.

In 2015, he launched an English-language news app called Top Buzz, but it fails to take off.

He desperately wants to break into America.

That's really hard with a news aggregation app.

For one thing, they face stricter copyright laws.

And a strategy report suggests the outlook for the international push looks bad, but Zhang refuses to give up.

And And something new was about to revolutionize the app market, and that was short-form video.

So, in 2013, an American short-form video app called Vine launches.

Vine is, well, was actually because it sadly is no longer with us, is very short.

You think TikTok is shot.

Vine was only about maybe maximum six seconds long,

looping videos that just like went on and on and on.

But it was massively popular back then, wasn't it?

It was huge.

Within two years of launch, it had 200 million daily users and it was strangely influential in its times.

In 2014, I'm told, another video app launched called Musically.

It's musical.ly

and that focused on lip-syncing, short musicals.

It was a Chinese company, but within two years, it had nearly 50 million American users under the age of 21.

And that is amazingly, nearly half of all the teens and pre-teens in the USA.

Now, these apps, Vine and Musically, were tapping into a much younger market than a news app, for instance, like Totiao.

And that success is partly down to novelty, because prior to these apps, video hadn't really worked very smoothly.

But also, young people love their easy-to-use editing features.

It inspired huge creativity in teenagers who were making comedy videos, music videos, funny memes.

So ByteDance decides to try and steal some of Musically's thunder.

It launches a very similar app, which they called Doyin, which translates to shaky beat in Chinese.

And this is the app that we now know as TikTok, essentially?

Yes, exactly.

Douyin is sort of the Chinese equivalent of TikTok.

So of the 2,000 Byte Dance staff, a team of only 10 engineers were assigned to work on Douyin.

They launched it in September 2016 after developing it for just 200 days, which sounds pretty quick.

It is pretty quick, I would say.

And it also meant that Doyin had a lot of technical glitches, so it wasn't very popular.

And one creator, when asked to join the app, told Doyen your product is too basic you want to get on the highway with this broken old car oh burn feel the burn

but in the meantime their other app Tu Chiao is doing very well in China it's becoming the leading news app there which means bike dance was able to raise a billion dollars in funding in early 2017 so they're moving into the big leagues now and Zhang used this money to give Doyen a bit of a revamp the tech improved the app rebranded with what is now that iconic quite glitchy musical note logo you'll recognize from tick tock they added filters, they made editing simpler, they made basically the whole user experience more engaging.

And also they positioned the app as a more up-market product which appealed to young Chinese living in cities, you know, urban elites.

They sponsored music shows on Chinese television including a hip-hop reality show called The Rap of China.

One of the contestants, Vava, then touted as China's answer to Rihanna said, all the people into hip-hop are all on Douyin.

And it's kind of like this virtuous circle, right?

So the more people that use Doin, the more the algorithm learns what they like, the more the algorithm pushes content they might watch, and they encourage people to stay longer on the platform, etc., etc.

It's like a snake eating its tail.

And on it goes.

And Zan could see the potential for the video app.

And as a tech insider said, he threw more money at it than any other company and dared to hunt down the very best people.

He actually also made it compulsory for management teams to upload their own content to TikTok to understand how the platform worked.

He even downloaded his own videos, which he admitted was a big step for me.

And those people with the least number of likes actually had to do push-ups to make up for it.

I mean, it's bringing sort of military discipline to bear on something like social media seems nuts to me.

It's like down in 10.

You didn't get enough likes for your dog picture.

All this meant that Dooyin became a more successful app.

Within a year, they had 100 million users in China.

Okay, let's do

a quick tally here.

He's now got two hugely successful apps, Dooyin and Totiao.

Both are just, just, though, within the Chinese market.

So in 2017, ByteDance buys competitors Musically

for $1 billion in order to enter the US market.

While Musically is a Chinese competitor, it has a...

pretty big global audience.

And this acquisition is what gives them 200 million users worldwide.

And it also kills the competition, right?

Yeah.

And so a week after buying Musically, Forbes declared Zhang was a billionaire.

Age 33, he's worth $4 billion.

That is just five years after he founded the parent company Byte Dance.

Wow, that's quick.

Right after becoming a billionaire, Zhang launches the app that we all now know in summer 2018.

Doiyin is now launched worldwide under the name TikTok.

It migrates all MusicLee's accounts to TikTok and within months, the parent company ByteDance is valued at a cool $75 billion making it the world's biggest privately backed startup company.

And in six months of launching TikTok it surpasses 1 billion downloads.

So let's see why it's so popular.

As you know I am a new person to TikTok.

I'm looking at it now.

I've probably been on it now for about half an hour, 14 minutes ago.

And because I've been chatting to you, I've been staying on pages kind of rather randomly, which all seem to involve cars or planes.

And it's a full screen image of a video which basically loops itself around.

And all I do is swipe upwards and I get another one.

So if I'm bored of that one, I do another one.

Bored of that one, I do another one.

And I suppose that is the kind of attention span threat that some people say TikTok poses.

So far, I'm enjoying it, I think.

Do you remember the videos you watched four videos ago?

I remember one of them.

One of them was about saying how on earth do you have a 60 mile an hour speed limit on a motorway in order to preserve air quality when you're going past

one of the world's biggest airports?

That's actually really impressive because I can tell you that when I go on TikTok I could sit on there for half an hour could probably tell you maybe one or two videos in detail that I've watched.

But I'm but I'm new to it.

The rot hasn't set in yet.

Yes, the brain rot hasn't set in.

But I mean TikTok is hugely popular.

I think part of it is also because of the algorithm.

It's very good at serving you content that it thinks you will like.

Yeah.

And also, you know, viral memes, viral culture basically all emerges from TikTok nowadays.

And its influence extends right across loads of different industries.

Exactly.

I mean, in music alone, it's launched the careers of people.

You know, Leona's ex became huge because of his song Old Town Road, which became big on TikTok.

It changes who becomes famous.

Random people from TikTok can just suddenly become the most talked about people on the platform.

You know, there's a really famous guy called Dogface who went viral for skateboarding and drinking cranberry juice while lip-syncing along to Dreams by Fleetwood Mac.

Completely random, but I guarantee you will be recognized on the street for years to come.

I'm kidding me.

It's like there's an alternative reality out there, which I do not recognize.

There's what happens over there and there's what happens in what I would call the real world.

Yeah.

It's like a kind of like through the looking glass kind of experience.

For many people, I think TikTok now is the real world.

Gosh, okay.

Well, anyway, TikTok is becoming such a powerful and popular cultural force.

Concerns started being raised.

You always get, you know, when something becomes that popular, the backlash starts.

Most were that TikTok could be collecting sensitive data from user that could be used by the Chinese government for spying.

You know, there was a war of words between the US and China, and this was another front in that tension, right?

This geopolitical tension.

Exactly.

In 2020, so under Trump, the United States Department of Justice called Zhang a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party in illegal filing, which is something that Byte Dance strenuously denied.

Another concern that was raised was the possibility of censorship or the app being used to influence public debate.

TikTok is one of the first platforms many young people share social activism content on.

And in 2019, The Guardian reported that TikTok actually censored material deemed to be politically sensitive, including footage of Tiananmen Square protests and Tibetan independence demands.

ByteDance has said that guidelines like this have actually been phased out and that all moderation is done independently of Beijing.

But in 2020, TikTok was actually banned in India along with 59 other Chinese apps over security concerns.

This was following escalating tensions along the disputed border between the two powers.

India had been TikTok's biggest foreign market.

So it's really causing geopolitical ruptions this.

Yeah.

And again, ByteDance has strenuously denied all these claims, but it seems that this app just cannot stop but being pulled into huge debates about world powers.

It's amazing.

You've got people in the White House and in Washington talking about a social media app all the time.

It's central, it's seen, as being influencing behavior, thought, trends.

And politics.

And politics.

As the scrutiny grows around TikTok, Zhang is actually making a surprise move.

In 2021, he announces he's stepping down as CEO and chairman from Byte Dance, and his university roommate and co-founder Liang Rubo becomes CEO.

Yeah,

and Zhang actually wrote an open letter announcing he was stepping down outlining the reasons why he was leaving.

We can listen to a section from this letter which was translated on the BBC World Service.

Have a listen to this.

The truth is I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager.

I'm more interested in analysing organizational and market principles.

I'm not very social.

I prefer solitary activities like being online, reading, listening to music and daydreaming.

I mean what do we make of that?

I just love that someone who's a multi-billionaire can list his hobbies as being

online, reading, listening to music, and daydreaming.

I mean, same, you know, I just don't have a billion dollars to my name.

But I can count on the fingers of one hand, possibly one finger, of bosses who say, I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager.

You don't hear that every day.

No, it's true.

And definitely not from someone who is both the CEO and founder of the app that he created.

Yeah, but it's interesting at this point because he's one of at least five top Chinese chief executives who stepped down around this same time as part of the government's regulation that's either stepped up or changed.

So according to analysts, the Chinese government had become increasingly concerned about the power and influence amassed by wealthy tech entrepreneurs who were multi-billionaires, aka people like Tsang.

Yeah, so basically you're on the radar of the government.

Try and get off the radar.

Yeah, exactly.

Actually since 2020 the Chinese government has launched antitrust, data, labor regulations.

They fined companies for monopolistic practices, restricted consumers' internet use.

So really this is part of a broader crackdown on the Chinese internet.

And that's kind of what has happened to Zhang because today at the age of 41 he doesn't even live in China.

He's relocated to Singapore even though he still has Chinese citizenship.

Yeah, he's been described as reclusive, but he's still thought to have over 20% of the shares of Bike Dance.

That makes him worth $43 billion.

Yeah, but the future of that fortune is very unclear because in April 2024, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that gives ByteDance nine months to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese company or the app will be blocked in the US and the US is obviously one of their biggest markets.

That's, you know, this is the coal face of geopolitical tension, this, and Byte Dance has found itself right in the middle of it because TikTok called this legislation an unconstitutional ban, an affront to the US right to free speech, and it would give social media rivals more power and put thousands of American jobs at risk.

And at the time of recording, the U.S.

Appeals Court is still yet to hear TikTok's case against the ban.

So it's very much a case of watch this space.

Okay, and I'm watching this space on my phone, and I've just seen a Ferrari driving through the middle of London.

I don't know.

TikTok thinks you're a car guy.

I know.

Well, how can I do this?

What do I need to do?

I'm going to try and get out of this rut.

You need to swipe through as many car videos as quickly as possible.

Okay, there's the Grand Canyon.

There's a burnt out car.

Here's a fall and a lot.

It's too late.

I'm done.

I'm in the car rut.

Oh, they've lost you.

That's it.

Forever, I'll be associated with that.

Anyway, I can see the appeal of it because

if you get bored of that, you just flick, flick, flick, flick, flick.

Doom scrolling, is that what they call it?

Yes, it is very much a case of doom scrolling.

Although I think TikTok would argue that it's a case of joy scrolling because it gives you the videos that you really want to watch.

Joy scrolling, that's a new line on me.

Let's judge this person because we've got some categories we need to run through.

So, we have to judge our billionaire.

This is the point where we basically mark them out of 10 in a series of categories.

On wealth, so he's the second or third richest person in China, and he's actually the second richest social media billionaire behind his hero Mark Zuckerberg.

Yeah, $43 billion, that puts him very much in the first division, doesn't it?

Yeah, it really does.

So, I would give him probably seven out of ten.

I mean, he doesn't wear it in a very good way.

Well, that's the thing, because sometimes when people haven't got that much money, it's 43 billion, but they do think really extravagant things like fly their nail technician on a private jet because they need their nails done or whatever.

We give them extra points to that, don't we?

We do.

So I think we have to deduct points from Dhang because he's not the type to do that.

It's a seven from me for sure.

Now, what about rags to riches?

How far has Dhang travelled to get to where he is?

Was he poor growing up?

I don't think he was from a solidly technocratic middle class kind of family, of the way I would describe it, although I don't quite understand the social stratification in China.

Yeah, I would say that he had a comfortable upbringing, like not particularly upper class or well-off, but you know, fine.

And the way he set out the conditions for which university he was going to attend, like not near my parents so they can come and check up on me.

It's got to be somewhere where it snows because I've never seen it before, needs to be near the sea, da da da.

That's quite picky.

Yeah, it really is.

So I would say, you know, I mean, it is a great story.

He's gone from not one of the best-ranked universities in China to being one of the richest people in the country and also the center of all this geopolitical intrigue.

So in that sense, it's quite the journey.

It's not so much where he's come from, it's where he's reached in terms of what he's achieved.

I'm going to give him a six.

Yeah, I would give him a six as well.

Okay.

Well, I mean, who knows what's going to to happen to him in his future?

Yeah.

We also have a category called villainy.

What have they done along the way to get there?

Have they done people over?

Have they been particularly ruthless or been active, corporate malfeasance, or anything like that?

I think in one of these things, we've done it before.

We have to separate the person from the company because he seems pretty, in a way, kind of chilled out, nondescript, kind of clever guy who founded a company which has grown like a monster, you know, in its own way.

And so you can probably like Zhang, you mean,

and hate TikTok, or

vice versa.

So,

I mean, as a person, it doesn't sound like he's a particular villain, but your view of his contribution to the world will depend on what your view of contribution to society of TikTok is.

So, Zhang means very private, and we actually don't know that much about him.

So, I feel like I have to judge this category based on TikTok alone, because that's the thing that he created.

That's the thing he's known for.

Fine.

Okay, I think that's fair enough.

So, we've talked about some of the concerns that have been raised by people about TikTok early in this episode, but there have also been deaths linked to various challenges that have gone viral on TikTok, and various lawsuits have been brought against the company.

Now, none have been upheld, but there are currently still various lawsuits against TikTok being brought by parents in France and the US who accuse TikTok of pushing content about suicide to their children who have since taken their own lives.

A TikTok spokesperson recently told the American news broadcaster, the NBC, that while the company couldn't comment on ongoing litigation, TikTok continues to take industry-leading steps to provide a safe and positive experience for teens.

They note that teen accounts are set to private by default and that teens have an opt-out 60-minute screen time allowance before they're prompted to enter a passcode.

Yeah, and also worth mentioning that TikTok does have clear policies against users publishing content showing, promoting or providing instructions on suicide or self-harm and related challenges, dares, games and packs, including naming or describing methods, showing or promoting suicide or self-harm hoaxes and sharing plans for suicide or self-harm.

In a way, it feels to me, and I might be wrong about this and people can get in touch with us, that once you start something like a TikTok, which is algorithmically led, which basically is fed by its own users, likes and what have you, you kind of unleash this genie out of the bottle and it does its own thing.

And the other thing that people like Facebook have always said is that, you know, we're not publishers, we're just a platform, we're not subject to the same rules as, for example, a newspaper or a TV station like the BBC

would be.

And that's been a contentious thing, saying, you know, you're abrogating your responsibility for the content that's going into people's brains and minds and into their lives.

And that's, I suppose, the frontier of that entire argument.

Yeah, I definitely think that in the same way Facebook has had to deal with issues of responsibility and questions of whether you're a publisher who's responsible for the content versus versus just merely the platform that hosts it.

I think TikTok is very much at the beginning of that journey with lawmakers.

And the criticism is that some of these companies are very good at using AI to generate users and traffic and all that kind of stuff.

But they're not as good at using AI when it comes to moderating the content, taking down stuff which might be offensive or harmful.

You know, why aren't you as good at that bit as you are at generating the traffic in the first place?

Especially when you've got a billion-dollar app.

Yeah, exactly.

So, okay, villainy.

I'm going to say personally, he's not a villain at all.

So, I'm gonna give him a three as a person.

TikTok, obviously, listen,

I'm early on in my career with TikTok.

I don't find it offensive, and it's being blamed for the terrible attention span of people, including my own family members.

And this stuff takes out more of a chunk of your day than we've ever seen anything do like that before.

And I'm not sure that's an entirely good thing.

Is TikTok good?

Come on.

Hmm.

How do I I feel about TikTok?

It actually varies depending on the day.

There will be some days where I look at TikTok and I'm like, this is so much fun.

I'm learning so much.

I'm being really entertained.

And then there's some days where I look at the amount of time I spent on TikTok and thought, God, I could have read War and Peace.

Okay.

You know?

So I think it actually has had an impact on people's attention spans.

But then the problem is, is that if...

Do yin and TikTok didn't exist, someone else would have invented it.

Someone else would have also created the magic algorithm that sucked people in.

That's true.

So

it's not a sort of discrete, malevolent act.

It's kind of like it was going to happen.

That gets the nature of the media.

Yeah, exactly.

But I would say that, you know, for the amount that it's done to kind of pull people away from traditional media sources, even though, you know, people like the BBC are already on TikTok.

Yeah.

I would give it maybe a seven.

Okay.

It's a challenge to media in the same way that I think Meta is.

But you know, when we talked at the beginning of this series about how one of the interesting things about billionaires and their incredible success is that they sort of hold up a mirror to us of what it is we want or enjoy or, you know, are hooked on.

So no one's forcing us to watch these videos.

We are obviously part of the engine which generates TikTok's success.

So maybe it's naive or kind of wrong to blame the app itself, maybe that we're to blame.

I don't know.

I do think and I see this in my generation as well, that because TikTok is fed with user content, mostly user generated content, it's created this kind of strange attitude in which everyone and everything in life is up for filming.

And I don't know if you've ever encountered, you know, when you go on holiday and suddenly everyone's on their phones capturing content.

I think maybe taking photos for Instagram was one thing, but taking video for me, you know, I've seen people taking video of

strangers on the street who are stumbling around drunk and laughing and putting it up.

I mean, the whole thing kind of feels like a new breach of the social contract.

Maybe, yeah.

It's interesting if you go to a concert as well, you know, just look at all the phones.

And sometimes the, you know, singers of the act have to beg people to put their phones down just for a few seconds.

Okay, so on villainy, I'm going to give them five straight down the middle.

You're going to give seven.

Okay, interesting, interesting split there.

Philanthropy, how much good have they done?

How much money of their vast wealth they've given away?

So Zhang is very private about his spending, but he has publicly donated to various charitable causes, including 100 million to education in his hometown, 14 million to the Chinese Red Cross for medical workers.

He's also thrown his former university at call 7 million and given 10 million to help develop a COVID-19 vaccine.

Okay, I'm totting all that up.

140, 120, 131 million.

Not bad, but in context, 43 billion.

We don't know the full extent of what he's been up to.

So I would say I'm going to give that a

so far

work to date on philanthropy four out of ten.

Yeah, I would say maybe I mean how much of that is a proportion of overall wealth?

Not tons.

Okay so it's one two hundred and fortieth of his wealth doing the little maths in my mind.

Okay surely that's it's gotta be for you.

It's a two.

It's a two yeah.

Right.

Okay power.

In 2019, Zhang was named one of Time magazine's one hundred most influential people.

Do we agree?

I mean at the height of his power when he was heading up bite dance, yeah, probably, but not now he's in kind of effective seclusion in Singapore, right?

I don't think he ever wanted to be powerful.

He made this thing that had enormous power.

Whereas Mark Zuckerberg, you get a feeling is still very hands-on, can change the algorithm if he wants to, can moderate humanity and the way they interact with each other.

I don't think he's anywhere near that and doesn't want to be anywhere near that.

So I would actually give him a, I'd say TikTok clearly has, you know, enormous power, but like I say, that's grown, it's like a thing that's grown itself.

I don't feel like he's at the wheel.

Do you know what I mean?

It feels like it's got a life of its own.

So, personally, I would say TikTok as power, you've got to give it an eight.

Yeah, right?

Yeah, Zhang himself, I'd give him a two.

You know, take your pick.

Split it down the middle, and he's kind of a five out of ten.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

Okay, I mean, come on, if one of your hobbies is going online and daydreaming, you're not going to score very highly on power.

You just don't have the, you just don't seem to kind of have the motivation to exercise it.

Okay, so five each on power legacy.

I mean, you're never going to get rid of TikTok or apps like it, are you?

No, and I think really what TikTok has done is shown the kind of importance of short-form social video apps.

I don't think we're ever going to get rid of social video because of platforms like TikTok.

It feels like the Warholian

prophecy that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes seems wildly

insufficient for what's happened.

It's almost like you want to dig Andy Wahoo out of his grave and say, come up with a new theory.

Check this out.

The point is, if someone hadn't done TikTok, somebody else would have done.

They happened on this short-form video kind of stuff,

which,

you know, ultimately anyone could do.

There's nothing stopping other platforms doing that kind of short-form video stuff.

But I do think that there's something about TikTok, and I reckon it's to do with the algorithm, which is uniquely good at doing that.

And I think we have to give Dan some credit for being the person to invest so heavily in the algorithm, getting all those engineers to work on it, realizing that that was the thing that made the platform so special.

Yeah, I think the legacy might be

making us realize what we are actually like.

A shudder just ran down my spine at that.

Do you know what I mean?

I think that it's kind of said, this is who we are.

This This is what gets us going.

This is what titillates, amuses, captivates us.

So for legacy, I mean, I would score him quite highly on this, I think.

Okay.

Fine.

I'm going to go seven for legacy.

I'm going to give Tsang an eight.

Wow, okay.

Because I do think that when we look back at the social media wars, TikTok is already and will become one of the huge players in that field.

So is he good, bad, or just another billionaire?

For me, it comes down to he's either bad or just another billionaire.

I mean,

I would say if he was more of a Mark Zuckerberg figure, you know, iron grip on the thing that he's created,

appearing in Congress to defend it, you know, those kind of billionaire traits,

he would nudge himself into bad billionaire territory.

But I kind of wonder, I don't know, the fact that he stepped away from it, the fact that he talks about, you know, his hobbies.

He's a terrible leader.

Being a terrible leader, his hobbies at being daydreaming and listening to music.

He just seems a bit of an idiosyncratic figure who like a Dr.

Frankenstein who created a monster.

Yeah, whatever you think about TikTok, he seems to be a very inoffensive person.

So I'm going to say he is just another billionaire.

Hmm, oh, it's difficult for me.

I actually would say he is just another billionaire as a person.

Okay.

But the product he created, I don't know, watch the space.

You know, TikTok might very well bring down democracy.

Wow.

What a way to end.

So who do we have on the next episode?

We have the man who is leading a technology which will one day kill us all, cure us all, mean we can't believe anything we read, see or hear.

AI Wrangler-in-Chief, Sam Altman of OpenAI.

You may have heard of OpenAI because it's made ChatGPT and we'll also be asking their number one product exactly what it thinks of its founder, Sam Altman.

Good Bad Billionaire is a podcast from the BBC World Service.

It's produced by Hannah Hufford and Mark Ward, with additional production by Tams and Curry.

James Cook is the editor.

For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins, and the podcast commissioning editor is John Minnell.

We'd like to thank Matthew Brennan, who wrote the book Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's Bite Dance, which was very helpful in translating some of the original Chinese reporting.

So, let me search, let me pull up my TikTok app and search Good, Bad, Billionaire.

Now it's thinking about it.

And we're on it.

Yeah, we're on the BBC Sounds

platform.

Love this app.

Force of Good, no doubt.

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