Who Is The TikTok CEO And What Challenge Is He Faced With?
The TikTok CEO is a Singaporean businessman named Shou Zi Chew. He was the CEO of social networking company TikTok and the CFO of its parent company, ByteDance. He was appointed as the TikTok CEO in May 2021. Before that, he was a longtime investor and former executive at Xiaomi.
The 40-year-old former Goldman Sachs banker and Singaporean army reserve is scheduled to testify before a House panel on Thursday to defend the use of TikTok and convince Americans that their data is secure and that Beijing won’t be able to control what users see on the platform.
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Shou Zi Chew was born on January 1, 1983. According to some sources, his net worth is estimated to be around $200 million. He is not rich like the Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma who has a net worth of $23.3 billion and that may have made him more vulnerable and an easy target for the American political establishment.
The Americans never had problems with Alibaba, but they cannot control TikTok? That’s a tricky question. TikTok-like videos are also found on YouTube, but it is apparent to the American government that YouTube does not disrupt the American way of life.
The TikTok CEO
Shou Zi Chew is currently navigating the US ban of TikTok and is set to testify before the House energy and commerce committee about the company’s privacy and data-security practices, as well as its relationship with China. He is also planning to confront congress on how the ban might negatively impact the US economy.
Mr. Chew spent some of his early career negotiating contracts for a venture capital firm in Asia. Born and raised in Singapore, he received his education in London and at Harvard Business School. At the age of 32, he then swiftly rose to the position of chief financial officer for a major Chinese smartphone company. It was a meteoric rise for the young man.
The US government has expressed concerns over the app’s data privacy and security practices, as well as its relationship with China. The US government has also demanded that ByteDance divest its stake in the app or face a US ban. China has accused the United States of spreading disinformation and suppressing TikTok following reports that the Biden administration was calling for its Chinese owners to sell their stakes in the popular video-sharing app.
Origin of TikTok
ByteDance was founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming, Liang Rubo and a team of others. The company developed the video-sharing social networking services and apps TikTok and Chinese-specific counterpart Douyin. ByteDance is also the developer of the news platform Toutiao. As of June 2021, ByteDance hosts 1.9 billion monthly active users across all of its platforms.
TikTok was created by Chinese tech giant ByteDance and was first released in September 2016 under the name “Douyin”. Douyin was marketed as a video-sharing social networking service similar to Facebook and Instagram (both of which are banned in China). In 2018, ByteDance acquired Musical.ly and merged it with its own lip-synching app, known as Douyin. The result was TikTok, which debuted in August 2018.