7 facts about Billionaires of the week: Bernard Arnault and TikTok boss Zhang Yiming

This week, Bernard Arnault made the news for beating Jeff Bezos to top the Billionaire list while TikTok boss Zhang Yiming retired at 38 with a net worth of $44 billion.

You may have spent some time reading about these men, but some of the unique facts in this article will totally blow you away. Let’s begin with Bernard Arnault 7 facts:

7 facts about Bernard Arnault 

1. In May 2021, Forbes reported that he had surpassed Jeff Bezos net worth with $300 million taking him to the top spot. However, the Amazon boss briefly went back to the top before Arnault reclaimed the spot some hours later. Bernard Arnault had gained $110 billion between March 2020 and May 2021, in just over a year.
2. He was nicknamed ‘the wolf in cashmere’ because of the way he manoeuvred his way into controlling the luxury fashion company, LVMH, in the 1980s.
3. LVMH owns Rihanna’s Fenty brand, Christian Dior, Givenchy, Marc Jacobs, Stella McCartney, Loro Piana, Kenzo, Celine, Princess Yachts, Bulgari, and 65 others.
4. In 1986, he earned the nickname ‘The Terminator’ for firing 9,000 workers in two years after he bought Christian Dior parent company, Boussac.
5. Arnault is an avid art collector and has works by legendary artists such as Picasso, Yves Klein, Henry Moore, and Andy Warhol.
6. The billionaire has been married twice and has five children, with many of them having official roles in his brands. For example, his daughter Delphine Arnault is director and executive vice president of Louis Vuitton. His son Antoine is the CEO of Berluti and chairman of Loro Piana.
7. He tried to apply for Belgian citizenship in 2013 and move to Belgium but withdrew the request when it was interpreted as an attempt to evade tax, at a time when France faced economic and social challenges.

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7 facts about TikTok boss Zhang Yiming

1. Zhang Yiming started his career as a software engineer and he worked at Microsoft in 2008 after leaving Kuxun, a travel website.
2. In 2012, as a competition for Baidu, he founded ByteDance, as a news aggregator known as Toutiao app. It reached 13 million daily users within two years.
3. ByteDance launched TikTok in 2015 and its Chinese version Douyin, and despite little promotion it went viral within a year.
4. In 2018, ByteDance recorded 1 billion monthly users and was valued at $75 billion. Zhang’s wealth had grown to $22.6 billion.
5. He was named in the 2013 China 30 Under 30 list by Forbes and made Fortune magazine’s 40 Under 40 list in 2018 as well as Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2019.
6. Zhang Yiming met his wife at Nankai University in Tianjin in 2002 and they have been married for over a decade.
7. In May 2021, he was worth $44.5 billion and his company ByteDance was valued at $250 billion making it the most valuable startup in the world ahead of Stripe and SpaceX.

While TikTok boss Zhang Yiming has announced his imminent retirement at 38, Bernard Arnault is still making big strides at 72. A real tale of two billionaires with different prospects for the future.

You may also like to read our recent article 12 divorces and marriage lives of billionaires as Bill and Melinda Gates split.