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Indian industrialist Gautam Adani has lost his position as Asia's richest person to ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming, despite adding $24.8 billion to his own fortune this year.
Zhang, 43, is worth more than $105 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, having gained $40.3 billion in 2026. Adani's fortune stood at $109 billion at the index's most recent published snapshot, ranking him 19th globally against Zhang at 21st. Zhang has now moved ahead.
It is the first time Zhang has topped the regional ranking.
Fund managers moved the number
Zhang's wealth rose by more than $12 billion this month alone, after Bloomberg reviewed the latest ByteDance valuations reported by BlackRock, Fidelity Investments and T Rowe Price. Because ByteDance is privately held, the index applies a 10 percent risk discount to its valuation.
So the change at the top of Asia's rankings came from three American fund managers marking up a Chinese private company, rather than from a share price or a transaction.
ByteDance resolved its long-running standoff with US authorities in January, agreeing a joint venture with Oracle and Silver Lake for its American operations, which removed a threat that had hung over the company's valuation for years. Zhang's focus has since shifted to artificial intelligence, through the Doubao chatbot and the Seedance video generation model.
"He plays his cards right," Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, told Bloomberg. "He stayed on course and then continued to double down on AI investment."
Adani's year has been good
The loss of the title does not reflect a reversal at the Adani Group. His $24.8 billion gain this year has come from a conglomerate spanning ports, airports, logistics, power, renewables and cement.
Last week Adani Enterprises agreed to sell up to 5.54 percent of its airport unit to Temasek, BlackRock-managed funds, Alpha Wave Global and Premji Invest for about $1 billion, valuing Adani Airport Holdings at roughly $18 billion before the investment. That business runs eight airports and handles more than 23 percent of India's passenger traffic.
Adani's African ambitions have been less settled. Kenya cancelled a proposed Jomo Kenyatta International Airport concession and a power transmission agreement following his indictment in the United States, a case a US court has since dismissed.
His position has swung widely before. He was the world's second-richest person in September 2022 at $156.3 billion, fell below $50 billion in early 2023 after short-seller allegations against his group, and has climbed back since.
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