The crown for Asia's richest person has a new owner, and he built his fortune on dance videos. ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming has overtaken Indian tycoon Gautam Adani atop the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, after the TikTok parent company's private valuation got a fresh, eye-popping markup from some of the biggest names in money management.

Zhang's net worth now stands at roughly $105.5 billion, according to Bloomberg's index, edging past Adani's fortune, which has been battered by a brutal few weeks in Indian markets. The reversal is dramatic: Adani's empire peaked near $120 billion in June before an MSCI index rebalancing and a broader selloff tied to rising oil prices and bond yields wiped out billions in a single trading session, according to Eastern Eye's reporting. Adani now sits in second place in Asia and 20th globally.

Where the money came from

Zhang, 43, owns about 21% of ByteDance, the Beijing-founded company behind TikTok and its Chinese sibling Douyin. His fortune jumped more than $12 billion this month alone after asset managers including BlackRock, Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price updated the marks they carry on their private ByteDance holdings, according to Fortune. His wealth has climbed roughly $40 billion so far in 2026, an eightfold increase from the $13 billion Bloomberg first clocked him at back in March 2019.

The driver, analysts say, is artificial intelligence. ByteDance has poured resources into AI products like its Doubao chatbot and the Seedance video-generation tool, leaning on the mountain of user data pouring in from TikTok's 1 billion-plus daily users and Douyin's hundreds of millions in China.

"He plays his cards right. He stayed on course and then continued to double down on AI investment."

That's how Lian Jye Su, an analyst at Omdia, described Zhang's strategy.

The milestone lands less than a year after TikTok's U.S. future looked genuinely shaky. In January, ByteDance finalized a deal restructuring its American operations into a majority U.S.-owned joint venture backed by Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX, with ByteDance retaining a 19.9% stake and control over the app's advertising and e-commerce businesses. Bloomberg's index reportedly still applies roughly a 10% risk discount to ByteDance's valuation to account for lingering regulatory uncertainty.

Because ByteDance remains private, wealth trackers don't fully agree on Zhang's exact number — Forbes' real-time list pegs him closer to $84 billion, a gap that comes down to how aggressively each index marks up an unlisted company. Either way, Zhang now ranks 18th on Bloomberg's global rich list, ahead of household names like Michael Dell. Whether he holds the Asia crown will depend on two things largely out of his control: the next round of institutional markups on ByteDance stock, and whether Adani Group shares can claw back the ground lost to India's market swoon. Neither company has commented publicly on the ranking shift.