"Three times Lee Jaeyong's fortune?"... Meet China's richest man, who amassed 134 trillion won at 43.

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming
Wealth: about 134.2 trillion won
AI boom makes tech executives half of China's billionaires

The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has helped tech company executives make up a large share of this year's list of China's wealthiest people.

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming. The Asia Business Daily DB

According to the "2026 Hurun China Rich List," released on October 27 (local time) by the Hurun Research Institute, a Chinese research organization, the richest person in China is Zhang Yiming, 43, founder of ByteDance, the parent company of video platform TikTok. His wealth stands at 670 billion yuan (approximately 134.2 trillion won). That is about three times the wealth of Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong, a leading South Korean business figure, whose wealth is valued at $32.7 billion (approximately 43 trillion won).

Zhang's wealth rose by 200 billion yuan (approximately 40 trillion won) from a year earlier, an increase of 43%. He is the first person in the history of the Hurun China Rich List to surpass 600 billion yuan in wealth.

Zhang first topped the Hurun China Rich List in 2024, with wealth of 350 billion yuan (approximately 70.1 trillion won), but gave up the top spot last year to Zhong Shanshan, founder of bottled-water company Nongfu Spring. Zhong fell to second place as his wealth dropped to 410 billion yuan (approximately 82.1 trillion won) amid a decline in the share prices of affiliated companies.

Third place went to Zeng Yuqun, founder of battery maker CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited), with 385 billion yuan (approximately 77.1 trillion won); fourth to Tencent founder Ma Huateng, with 346 billion yuan (approximately 69.3 trillion won); and fifth to the family of He Xiangjian, founder of home appliance maker Midea Group, with 310 billion yuan (approximately 62.1 trillion won). In sixth place were Chen Jianhua and his wife, Fan Hongwei, of Hengli Group, which operates in industries including shipbuilding, with 302 billion yuan (approximately 60.4 trillion won).

In seventh place was Liang Wenfeng, founder of AI startup DeepSeek, with 280 billion yuan (approximately 56 trillion won). Liang appeared on the rich list for the first time this year. Chen Tianshi, founder of semiconductor company Cambricon, ranked 10th with 205 billion yuan (approximately 41 trillion won). Liang and Chen are both 41 years old. This means three tech company founders in their 40s made the Hurun China Rich List's top 10.

Also on the list, Zhu Yiming, founder of semiconductor company ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), ranked 39th with 109 billion yuan (approximately 21.8 trillion won), while Wang Xingxing, 36, founder of robotics company Unitree (Unitree Robotics), ranked 78th with 69.5 billion yuan (approximately 13.9 trillion won). Lei Jun of Xiaomi saw the largest decline in wealth, losing 157 billion yuan (approximately 31.4 trillion won) in a year.

The Hurun Research Institute said that half of those in the top 10 and about 60% of those in the top 100 built their fortunes in semiconductors, AI, robotics, and new energy. It said, "The construction of AI infrastructure has driven increases in the wealth of hardware companies across the computing-power industry chain, including semiconductor and optical-module companies."

The Hurun China Rich List includes entrepreneurs with personal wealth of at least 5 billion yuan (approximately 1 trillion won), calculated based on publicly available information and market valuations as of September 1. This year's list included a record 1,529 people, up 95 from the previous year. More than 160 of them were entrepreneurs in AI-related businesses, and 80 were in robotics-related businesses.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.