ByteDance has revolutionized the way people create and consume content through viral apps like TikTok, CapCut, and Douyin. These platforms have redefined social media trends, entertainment, and even ecommerce strategies worldwide. As of October 2024, ByteDance has a net worth of $278 billion, reflecting its position as the world’s most valuable private company.
At Business2Community, we’ve consulted a wide range of sources to provide you with a comprehensive overview of ByteDance’s net worth and history to help you understand how it hit such a lucrative valuation. Read on to discover the tech giant’s key milestones, revenue, controversies, and more.
ByteDance Key Company Data
ByteDance Net Worth: $278 billion
Date Founded: March 2012
Founded By: Zhang Yiming, Liang Rubo
Current CEO: Liang Rubo
Industries: Technology, artificial intelligence
ByteDance Stock Ticker: N/A
Dividend Yield: 0%
What is ByteDance’s Net Worth?
ByteDance had a net worth of $278 billion based on an analysis of a September 2024 BlackRock filing. Fuelled by its viral apps, the company has seen impressive growth since its founding. While ByteDance has yet to go public, private funding rounds have played a major role in its valuation.
From a valuation of $60 million in 2013, ByteDance’s valuation increased to $500 million in 2014. By 2016, ByteDance’s valuation had jumped to $11 billion, reaching $22 billion in 2017.
In 2020, the company’s net worth exceeded $100 billion, eventually reaching $180 billion by the end of the year. Having scrapped its plans for an initial public offering (IPO) in October 2021, ByteDance’s valuation soared to $400 billion in private markets.
However, a combination of factors including regulatory scrutiny and geopolitical tensions caused its valuation to drop to around $353 billion and eventually $217 billion in 2022.
In 2023, ByteDance conducted share buybacks, repurchasing over $5 billion in shares. This valued the company at $268 billion, surpassing Temu’s owner Pinduoduo and making ByteDance the second-largest internet company in China after Tencent.
ByteDance Revenue
As a private company, ByteDance isn’t required to publicly disclose its financial records. The company does, however, occasionally share some high-level financial information.
Following the success of its news aggregators and short video ventures, ByteDance generated over $7.4 billion in revenue in 2018. With the addition of verticals like ecommerce, that figure more than doubled to $17 billion in 2019.
While ByteDance reported $3 billion in net income, this fell to a loss of around $2 billion in 2020, mainly due to the cost of share-based compensation for ByteDance investors. However, the company rebounded in 2022 with revenue of $80 billion and earnings of over $25 billion.
Despite ongoing market and regulatory challenges, ByteDance’s revenue surged to $120 billion in 2023, while its profits exceeded $40 billion. This marked a notable 60% increase in profitability from the previous year and placed the company ahead of Chinese tech giants such as Tencent and Alibaba.
| Year | Revenue ($ billions) |
|---|---|
| 2018 | 7.4 |
| 2019 | 17.2 |
| 2020 | 34.3 |
| 2021 | 61.7 |
| 2022 | 80 |
| 2023 | 120 |
Who Owns ByteDance?
ByteDance is 60% owned by global institutional investors such as BlackRock, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group, 20% owned by ByteDance founders, and 20% owned by ByteDance employees.
ByteDance was founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming and Liang Rubo. The duo saw a gap in the budding mobile internet market and made it their mission to develop platforms to enrich people’s lives.
In its first year, ByteDance raised $3 million from angel investors and $1 million in Series A funding from SiG Asia.
2013 saw the company raise $1 million in Series B funding led by Apoletto, SiG Asia, and Source Code Capital. By 2015, ByteDance had raised an additional $100 million via a Series C funding round led by Sequoia China and Weibo.
The next year, in a Series D funding round led by Sequoia China and China Construction Bank International, ByteDance raised an impressive $1 billion.
Capital influx accelerated in 2017 and 2018, with ByteDance raising $2 billion in a Series E funding round led by General Atlantic and $2.5 billion in a Series F funding round led by General Atlantic, KKR, Primavera Capital Group, and Softbank.
In total, ByteDance raised $9.4 billion over twelve rounds, including $5 billion from its most recent round in December 2020.
Who is the ByteDance CEO?
The CEO of ByteDance is Liang Rubo, co-founder of the company. Before succeeding his college roommate, long-time colleague, and fellow co-founder, Zhang Yiming in 2021, Liang served as the head of human resources.
In January 2024, Liang made made headlines for laying into employees over their “complacency” and “slowness” in identifying AI’s potential. The CEO then announced three key priorities for the new year:
- Fighting against mediocrity and maintaining a “Day 1” mindset
- Gaining public trust
- Focusing on priority businesses
As of 2024, ByteDance’s board of directors consisted of five individuals, independent of any government or state entity.
Members included:
- Rubo Liang, ByteDance Chairman and CEO (Singapore-based)
- Arthur Dantchik, Susquehanna International Group (US-based)
- Bill Ford, General Atlantic (US-based)
- Philippe Laffont, Coatue Management (US-based)
- Neil Shen, Sequoia (Hong Kong-based)
In May 2021, ByteDance co-founder and then-CEO Zhang stepped down as chairman and chief executive citing a lack of managerial skills.
The truth is, I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager. I’m more interested in analyzing organizational and market principles, and leveraging these theories to further reduce management work, rather than actually managing people.
However, his resignation, alongside a series of high-profile departures by leaders of major Chinese tech firms — including Jack Ma’s exit from Alibaba in 2020, Simon Hu stepping down as CEO of Ant Group, and Colin Huang resigning as chairman of Pinduoduo in early 2021 — sparked speculation that Zhang’s decision was influenced by increasing regulatory scrutiny and pressure from the Chinese government.
| Year | CEO |
|---|---|
| 2012-2021 | Zhang Yiming |
| 2021-Present | Liang Rubo |
ByteDance’s Company History
ByteDance is the global technology and AI company behind successful products and services such as TikTok, CapCut, Lark, and Pico as well as offerings specific to China, including Toutiao, Feishu, Douyin, and Xigua. Headquartered in Beijing, ByteDance has over 150,000 employees across 120 cities globally.
Below, we explore the company’s journey to becoming the world’s most valuable privately held company.
2012-2014: ByteDance Takes Off
After collaborating on a real estate search engine called 99fang.com, entrepreneur Zhang Yiming and his college roommate Liang Rubo founded ByteDance in March 2012.
That same month, they launched Neihan Duanzi, a mobile app focused on humor. In early August, ByteDance launched Toutiao, a personalized news aggregator app powered by machine learning and deep learning algorithms.
By 2013, the company’s flagship app had over 1 million daily active users. ByteDance also launched 12 entertainment apps to explore lucrative opportunities in the mobile app market.
In 2014, the pair made improvements to Toutiao by creating Toutiaohao, an open content creation and distribution platform to attract more content creators. In just two years, Toutiao was not only profitable but also among the top news applications at the time.
2015-2019: ByteDance Goes International
ByteDance launched 20 apps to test foreign-market opportunities in 2015. Among them was TopBuzz, a content platform for videos, articles, breaking news, and GIFs.
While ByteDance’s first three years revolved around text and photo content projects inspired by the success of Toutiao, 2016 marked the company’s shift to short video.
That year, ByteDance acquired Flipagram, a video-sharing platform based in the US. The company also launched Douyin, a short video-sharing app for the Chinese market. ByteDance then allowed creators to promote third-party stores in their videos and live streams on the platform, entering yet another lucrative industry: ecommerce.
The company further expanded its news interests by becoming the majority owner of the Indonesian news app BABE.
Following the early success of Douyin, ByteDance launched TikTok, its short video offering for the global market in 2017. In November of that year, ByteDance acquired the popular short-video platform Musical.ly for $1 billion.
China’s media regulator ordered ByteDance to permanently shut down the app Neihan Duanzi in April 2018, for giving its more than 200 million users a platform to share “vulgar and improper content”.
In early August 2018, ByteDance merged Musical.ly, Flipagram, and TikTok into a single short video-sharing app, retaining the catchy TikTok name. Similar to the Chinese version, it took off, becoming the second most downloaded in the world in three months. With earnings of over $7 billion for the year and a valuation of over $75 billion, ByteDance earned the title of the world’s most valuable tech startup.
In 2019, ByteDance launched Lark, its first enterprise product, in Japan and Singapore. To mark its entry into the gaming business, the company launched Nuverse, a video game publisher.
ByteDance also made a total of 7 acquisitions that year, fueling its growth in artificial intelligence, digital media, and content distribution. The company’s efforts paid off, with revenues reaching $17.2 billion — more than doubling from the previous year.
2020-Present: ByteDance Prioritizes Profitability
In 2020, ByteDance released Capcut, a video editing app. By the end of the year, the company had over 1.9 billion users across its apps. The surge in users came as pandemic lockdowns left global consumers in search of entertainment online. During this period, ByteDance’s revenue skyrocketed by 111% driven by Douyin and its significant ad and ecommerce revenue.
Between 2020 and 2021, the company made headway in its mission to give back by exploring new initiatives in education, brain disease research, and digitizing ancient books. In 2021, ByteDance also made its first foray into virtual reality (VR) through the acquisition of Pico.
To strengthen its entertainment portfolio – which already consisted of short video apps, news aggregators, online novels, gaming, and music streaming – ByteDance acquired cinema ticketing platform Yingtuobang and online comics service Yizhikan Comics in 2022. The company also acquired low-code platform Hipa Cloud to enhance its productivity tool, Feishu.
With several ventures dragging down profits, Bytedance focused on shutting down unnecessary projects, reducing costs, and consolidating its resources in 2023.
In addition to cutting hundreds of jobs across its gaming development and enterprise software divisions, the company also shifted its focus to local lifestyle services, ecommerce, and generative AI.
Overall, the company’s strategy of stepping back from high-risk ventures and focusing on profitability, paid off, resulting in revenue growth rates of 80% and 38% between 2020 and 2023.
Throughout 2024, ByteDance made several strategic acquisitions. This included:
- An indirect 75% shareholding in Indonesia ecommerce unicorn Tokopedia
- Oladance, a Chinese earphone maker, for $50 million
- Union Mobile Pay (UMP), a fintech company for $200 million
In the second half of the year, the company announced plans to invest in a $2.13 billion artificial intelligence hub in Malaysia.
Tying into the company’s long-term AI plans, ByteDance released its flagship low-cost AI model, Doubao, in May 2024. Additionally, in September 2024, the South China Morning Post reported that ByteDance had unveiled 2 new video-generation AI models to compete with OpenAI’s Sora.
ByteDance Controversies
Over the years, ByteDance’s products have faced government-led investigations and large-scale bans in several countries, including Australia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Turkey over national security concerns. The company has also attracted regulatory scrutiny and media attention over data security, surveillance, and censorship concerns. We’ll run through ByteDance’s most recent controversies below.
US TikTok Ban or Divest Order
On April 24, 2024, US President Joe Biden signed a bill ordering ByteDance to sell TikTok to a government-approved buyer or face a ban. ByteDance was given nine months to divest, with the possibility of a three-month extension. This is due to end in January 2025.
Prior to the ban and divest order, TikTok faced scrutiny and bans on government devices across the US due to concerns that the Chinese government could access sensitive user data through the app.
On April 25, 2024, Reuters reported that ByteDance would consider shutting down its US operations if its efforts to fight the ban failed. Sources close to the matter stated that TikTok’s algorithms were proprietary and essential to ByteDance’s operations, complicating any potential sale.
On May 7, 2024, ByteDance sued the federal government, challenging the ban in a case expected to reach the Supreme Court. The company argued that selling TikTok was not feasible and that a ban would violate users’ First Amendment rights to free speech.
Further, in an investigation by 14 US Attorneys General into TikTok’s behavior, a range of documents were discovered and non-redacted versions were viewed by NPR in October 2024. The report details how the company is aware that children as young as 15 are stripping for on-platform rewards, it knows that it takes as little as 260 videos for a user to become addicted, and it harms analytical and cognitive abilities of young users.
More details of the revelations in the documents are covered here:
Scraping OpenAI’s API
On December 15, 2023, The Verge reported that ByteDance had used OpenAI’s API for its own generative AI projects.
ByteDance subsequently admitted to using OpenAI’s technology “to a very limited extent” to help develop its own AI models. The admission came days after Open AI suspended ByteDance’s account for violating its terms of service, which prohibit the use of its model outputs to create competing AI products.
Following the controversial revelation, ByteDance pledged to conduct a comprehensive review of its usage to ensure strict compliance with OpenAI’s terms.
Tracking Hong Kong Activists
According to a wrongful dismissal case filed by former ByteDance US Head of Engineering of ByteDance Yintao Yu in May 2023, ByteDance gave Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials “superuser” access. This allegedly allowed them to monitor the data, locations, and communications of Hong Kong protesters, civil rights activists, and their supporters.
ByteDance strongly denied these claims. However, Yu argued that he was fired for raising concerns about the “wrongful conduct” he witnessed while working at ByteDance.
Yu’s lawyer, Charles Jung clarified that the former executive felt the need to come forward after being disturbed by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s false Congressional testimony. In March 2023, Chew repeatedly denied that Chinese authorities had access to user data and outlined plans to keep US users’ data safe.
Jung acknowledged the risks of speaking out but emphasized that Yu was committed to ensuring public policy was informed by the truth.
Spying on Reporters
In 2022, ByteDance admitted to using TikTok to spy on reporters in an attempt to identify their sources.
At first, ByteDance denied the allegations, claiming the company could not monitor US users in the way suggested and that TikTok had never been used to target members of the US government, activists, public figures, or journalists. However, these claims were later proven false.
An internal investigation revealed that ByteDance employees had accessed the IP addresses of journalists, including former BuzzFeed reporter Emily Baker-White and Financial Times reporter Cristina Criddle. This was done to track their movements and determine whether they were in the same location as employees suspected of leaking information.
Although their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, TikTok’s chief internal auditor, Chris Lepitak, who led the operation, was fired, and his China-based manager, Song Ye, resigned. Two other employees involved in the matter were also dismissed.
What Can We Learn From ByteDance?
ByteDance’s success highlights the power of leveraging market trends. While many large content providers lagged in developing mobile-friendly platforms, ByteDance developed powerful algorithms and mobile technologies to meet growing consumer demand.
By identifying a gap in the market and offering users personalized information and entertainment, ByteDance has positioned itself as an industry leader.
ByteDance’s agile innovation strategy has also played a crucial role in its growth. By prioritizing continuous product development and improvement, the company has been able to take products to market rapidly and adjust its strategies as needed.
The company’s data-driven entrepreneurial culture has further strengthened its competitive advantage, allowing ByteDance to understand and cater to user preferences. Its successful foray into short video, for example, was driven by insights revealing that time spent viewing videos had increased sharply on Toutiao.
Over the years, ByteDance’s ties to China have exposed the company to public criticism, regulatory challenges, and political scrutiny. Its recent legal battles in the US highlight the risks of navigating geopolitical tensions.
Additionally, bans in several countries underscore the importance of protecting user data and complying with regulations. To achieve its long-term goals, ByteDance will need to focus on keeping its operations ethical and building credibility in global markets.