Zhang Yiming: TikTok’s tech boss

22:33Now remember, at this point, he still hasn't yet created TikTok, but he has this news app, Totiao, which is doing OK. 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 purchased 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 ByteDance.

23:08So 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 outlet for their international push looks bad, but Zhang refuses to give up. And something new was about to revolutionise the app market, and that was short-form video.

23:44So in 2013, an American short form video app called Vine launches. Vine is, or was actually, because it sadly is no longer with us, is very short. You think TikTok is short. 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 Musical.ly. 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.

24:29And that is, amazingly, nearly half of all the teens and preteens in the USA. say. Now these apps, Vine and Musical.ly, were tapping into a much younger market than a news app, for instance, like Totiao. And that success was 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 Musical.ly's thunder. It launches a very similar app, which they called Douyin, which translates to shaky beat in Chinese.

25:10And 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 2000 ByteDance 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 Douyin had a lot of technical glitches, so it wasn't very popular. And one creator, when asked to join the app, told Douyin, your product is too basic. You want to get on the highway with this broken old car? Oh, burn. Feel the burn.

25:46But in the meantime, their other app, Tuk Tiao, is doing very well in China. It's becoming the leading news app there, which means ByteDance 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 Douyin a bit of a revamp. The tech improved, the app rebranded with what is now that iconic, quite glitchy musical note logo you'll recognise from TikTok. 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 upmarket product, which appealed to young Chinese living in cities, you know, urban elites.

26:22They 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 Douyin, 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 Zhang 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.

26:59He actually also made it compulsory for management teams to upload their own content to TikTok to understand how the platform works. 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. Social media seems nuts to me. It's like down and 10. You didn't get enough likes for your dog picture. All this meant that Douyin became a more successful app. Within a year, they had 100 million users in China. Okay, let's do a quick tally here.

27:34He's now got two hugely successful apps, Douyin and Totiao. Both are just, though, within the Chinese market. So in 2017, ByteDance buys competitors Musical.ly for$1 billion in order to enter the US market. While Musical.ly 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 Musical.ly, Forbes declared Zhang was a billionaire. Age 33, he's worth$4 billion. That is just five years after he founded the parent company ByteDance. Wow, that's quick.

28:26Right after becoming a billionaire, Zhang launches the app that we all now know in summer 2018. Doyin is now launched worldwide under the name TikTok. It migrates all Musical.ly'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 one 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.

29:33Do 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 the 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 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.

30:08It's very good at serving you content that it thinks you will like. 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, Lil Nas X became huge because of his song Old Town Road, which became big on TikTok. It changes who becomes famous. Random people on 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.

30:49Completely random. But I guarantee you will be recognised on the street for years to come. Are you kidding me? It's like there's an alternative reality out there, which I do not recognise. There's what happens over there. And there's what happens in what I would call the real world. 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, OK. Well, anyway, TikTok is becoming such a powerful and popular cultural force. Concerns started being raised. You always get when something becomes that popular, the backlash starts.

31:20Most 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 caught Zhang a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party in illegal filing, which is something that Biden 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.

31:56And 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 is following escalating tensions along the disputed border between the two powers. India had been TikTok's biggest foreign market. It's really causing geopolitical ructions, this.

32:30And 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 White House and Washington. and talking about a social media app all the time. It's central, it's seen, as being influencing behaviour, 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 ByteDance and his university roommate and co-founder Liang Ruobo becomes CEO. Yeah, Zhang actually wrote an open letter announcing he was stepping down, outlining the reasons why he was leaving.

33:14We 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 organisational 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.

33:47But 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. 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 because they 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 Zhang.

34:25Yeah, 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, labour regulations. They find 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 ByteDance.

34:59That 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. You know, this is the coalface of geopolitical tension, this and ByteDance has found itself right in the middle of it because TikTok called this legislation an unconstitutional ban and a front to the US right to free speech. And it would give social media rivals more power and put thousands of American jobs at risk.

35:35And at the time of recording, the US 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. TikTok thinks you're a car guy. I know. How can I do this? What do I need to do to try and get out of this rut? You need to swipe through as many car videos as quickly as possible. OK, there's the Grand Canyon. There's a burnt out car. Here's a Formula One. 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.

36:12Anyway, 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.

36:46So 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 10. I mean, he doesn't wear it in a very... Well, that's the thing. 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.

37:23We give them extra points to that, don't we? We do. So I think we have to deduct points from Zhang 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 Zhang 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 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. 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.

38:03It's got to be somewhere where it snows because I've never seen it before. It 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 centre 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. Well, I mean, who knows what's going to happen to him in his future?

38:40Yeah. 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 a bit 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 Yiming 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.

39:26So Zhang Yiming's 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 accused TikTok of pushing content about suicide to their children who have since taken their own lives.

40:05A TikTok spokesperson recently told the American news broadcaster 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.

40:45In 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 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'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 just merely the platform that hosts it.

41:41I 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 going to give him a three as a person.

42:15TikTok, 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. How do 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 are some days where I look at the amount of time I spent on TikTok and thought, God, I could have read War and Peace.

42:53Okay. You know, so I think it actually has had an impact on people's attention spans. But then the problem is, is that if Douyin 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's 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.

43:26Yeah. 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. No one's forcing us to watch these videos. We are obviously part of the engine which generates TikTok 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.

44:14Yeah. 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. Sometimes the singers or the acts have to beg people to put their phones down just for a few seconds.

44:44OK, so on villainy, I'm going to give them five straight down the middle. You're going to give? Seven. OK, interesting, interesting split there. philanthropy, how much good have they done? How much money of their vast wealth have they 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 core 7 million and given 10 million to help develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Okay, I'm totting all that up.

45:21140, 130, 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, 4 out of 10. Yeah, I would say maybe. I mean, how much of that is a proportion of overall wealth? Not tons. OK, so it's 1 240th of his wealth, doing the little maths in my mind. OK, surely that's... OK, it's a two. It's a two, yeah. OK, power. In 2019, Zhang was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people. Do we agree? I mean, at the height of his power, when he was heading up ByteDance, yeah, probably, but not now he's in kind of effective seclusion in Singapore, right?

46:14I don't think he ever wanted to be powerful. or 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 in the way they interact with each other. I 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 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.

46:50Yeah. Right? Yeah. Zhang himself, I 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. OK. 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. OK, 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 I know.

47:44It's almost like you want to dig Andy Warhol 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, realising that that was the thing that made the platform so special.

48:24Yeah, I think the legacy might be making us realise 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 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 Zhang 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?

49:07For 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, eye and grip on the thing that he's created, appearing in Congress to defend it, you know, those kind of billionaire traits. Yeah. 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. Being a terrible leader. Being a terrible leader, his hobbies are being daydreaming and listening to music. He just seems a bit of an idiosyncratic figure, like a Dr.

49:44Frankenstein 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. 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 this 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. I mean, we can't believe anything we read, see or hear. AI, Wrangler-in-Chief, Sam Altman of OpenAI.

50:28You 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 Tamsin 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 Manel. We'd like to thank Matthew Brennan, who wrote the book Attention Factory, the story of TikTok and China's ByteDance, which is very helpful in translating some of the original Chinese reporting.

51:06So 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. Love this app. Force for good, no doubt. This is the story of the one. As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility, he knows keeping the line up and running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Grainger. Because when a drive belt gets damaged, Grainger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs. And next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork.

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