On October 27, the Hurun Research Institute released its China Rich List. ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming topped the list with a net worth of approximately $100 billion, a 43% year-on-year increase, primarily driven by his investments in artificial intelligence. Zhong Shanshan and Zeng Yuqun ranked second and third, respectively.
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming has become China's richest person for the first time on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
In the early hours of April 11, 2018, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming published an open letter regarding the permanent shutdown of his Neihan Duanzi app, saying the product had gone down the wrong path, contained content inconsistent with the core socialist values, and had not properly implemented guidance of public opinion.
The high-traffic app Neihan Duanzi was ordered to shut down permanently due to improper content management, and founder Zhang Yiming subsequently issued a public apology letter.
Zhang Yiming stepped down as CEO of Jiujiufang and subsequently began preparing a new internet information distribution business.
Zhang Yiming founded 99fang, scraping, cleaning, categorizing and deduplicating housing listing information from different websites and feeding it into a mobile app.
Zhang Yiming joined the Chinese microblogging service Fanfou, where he was responsible for technical work including search, message distribution, trending-word mining, anti-cheating, and user ranking.