On 27 March, the research group Hurun released its Global Rich List for 2025. The latest list witnessed the change of guards of the richest person in China. Zhong Shanshan (钟睒睒), the “bottled water tycoon”, founder and chairman of Nongfu Springs (农夫山泉), occupied the top seat for years. This year, he was dethroned by none other than Zhang Yiming (张一鸣), founder and former CEO of ByteDance, the parent group of short-form video platforms Douyin and TikTok.
Zhang Yiming is also listed as the richest person in China on Forbes and Bloomberg. Zhang is worth 65.5 billion USD, according to Forbes’s estimation, and is the 23rd richest person in the world. Meanwhile, Ma Huateng, the co-founder and CEO of Tencent and Zhong Shanshan follow as number 27 and 28 on the Forbes list. Bloomberg ranks Zhang at number 24 in the world with a 57.5 billion USD net worth, while Ma and Zhong rank 25 and 26, respectively.
On Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent, the topic “Zhang Yiming is the richest person in China with 65.5 billion USD net worth” (#张一鸣655亿美元身家登顶中国首富#) reached number 11 on the Hot Search list with 44.11 million views. Netizens find it interesting that social platform entrepreneurs are now taking over e-commerce for the top spots, just as e-commerce took over from property tycoons before.
The Hurun list also includes interesting changes as Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun has become the fastest-growing Chinese entrepreneur, and Liang Wenfeng of DeepSeek makes it to the list with 3.3 billion RMB (454.71 million USD) in net worth. It seems that with the success of social platforms and AI, another wave of Chinese entrepreneurs is ready to take the world stage.
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