ByteDance representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment.

It’s a tough time to be wealthy in China as the government seeks to rein in the country’s most powerful corporations and their billionaire founders. Just ask Jack Ma. After opening an antitrust probe, regulators fined Alibaba a record $US2.8 billion and the central bank ordered an overhaul of his Ant Group  fintech empire so it’d be supervised more like a bank.

“Keep an ordinary mind, that’s something that sounds easy but important to do. Put in the plainest words, when hungry, eat, when tired, sleep.”

ByteDance founder Zhang Jiming

While ByteDance hasn’t been singled out as a target, its dominance in social media and war chest for dealmaking are sensitive areas the government is looking into.

“There are no more silly games in the US with Trump and potential bans or forced asset sales,” said Kirk Boodry, founder of investment research firm Redex Holdings. “But the pressure on tech-share prices and China in particular might make $US250 billion a tough sell,” he added, referring to ByteDance’s value in private transactions.

Born in the southern Chinese city of Longyan, Zhang, the only son of civil servants, studied programming at Tianjin’s Nankai University, where he built a following on the school’s online forum by fixing classmates’ computers. He joined Microsoft for a brief stint after graduating, later calling the job so boring he often “worked half of the day and read books in the other half,” according to an interview with Chinese media. He went on to develop several ventures, including a real estate search portal.

His breakthrough came in 2012, when working in a four-bedroom apartment in Beijing he created ByteDance’s first hit - a joke-sharing app that was later shut down by Beijing’s censors. It then turned to news aggregation before winning over more than 1 billion global users with its short-video platforms TikTok and Chinese twin app, Douyin. In the process, it attracted big-name investors such as SoftBank Group, Sequoia Capital and proprietary-trading firm Susquehanna International Group, making it a rarity among Chinese internet startups that usually get absorbed into the wider ecosystems of Tencent and Alibaba Group.

Novel Concept

One of Zhang’s earliest supporters, Susquehanna has become ByteDance’s largest outside backer with a 15 per cent stake, according to a Wall Street Journal story in October. The initial bet was made at the start of 2012, when ByteDance’s news app Toutiao was just a concept that Zhang had drawn up on napkins, according to a 2016 blog post by Joan Wang, who led that investment for Susquehanna’s Chinese venture-capital unit.

With TikTok facing scrutiny in the US and India, Zhang has put more effort into ByteDance’s nascent and fast-growing Chinese businesses, which range from gaming to education to e-commerce. That helped it increase sales to about $US35 billion last year and operating profit to $US7 billion, a person familiar with the results said.

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Investors are eyeing the IPO of some of ByteDance’s businesses after Chinese competitor Kuaishou Technology raised $US5.4 billion in February in the biggest internet listing since Uber. The firm’s market value is now nearing $US140 billion. Last month, ByteDance hired former Xiaomi executive Chew Shou Zi as its chief financial officer, filling a long vacant position that will be crucial for its eventual market offering.

For Zhang, it’s not all about immediate payoffs. The affable founder is known for his business philosophy of “delaying satisfactions” as he puts the focus on long-term growth - a message he stressed again during his spiel to employees at the company’s ninth anniversary celebration last month.

“Keep an ordinary mind, that’s something that sounds easy but important to do,” he said. “Put in the plainest words, when hungry, eat, when tired, sleep.”

Bloomberg