TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, once worked as an intern for Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. Just a decade later, he has become one of Meta’s fiercest competitors.
Shou Zi Chew earned a degree in economics from University College London before pursuing an MBA at Harvard Business School, where he interned at a growing company during the summer.
“It was called Facebook,” Chew told the Harvard Business School alumni website.
Soon after starting his technology career at Facebook in California, he moved abroad, living in London, Singapore, and Hong Kong, before eventually landing in Beijing, according to Fortune magazine.
Chew joined the Chinese technology company Xiaomi in 2015, helping the company go public three years later as its chief financial officer, according to the Harvard Business School alumni website.
In 2021, Chew’s career crossed paths again with Meta CEO Zuckerberg, but this time as a competitor. Chew joined TikTok in 2021, initially as CFO. Later that year, he became the CEO of TikTok while holding the CFO position at ByteDance. He ultimately focused entirely on the short-form video platform.
With at least 150 million active users per month in the U.S. and more than 1 billion worldwide, TikTok has become the main pillar of social media and a rare major platform not under Zuckerberg’s control.
Zuckerberg reportedly spent much of 2016 trying to acquire a key piece of what would become TikTok—an app known for lip-syncing videos called Musical.ly, according to Buzzfeed News. However, Zuckerberg lost out to ByteDance, which bought the app for $800 million in 2017. ByteDance merged Musical.ly with the existing TikTok platform, and the social network grew rapidly.
During several congressional hearings, Chew has defended TikTok against accusations that it poses a national security threat. In a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 2023, Chew took a dig at Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, stating that TikTok did not collect more data than U.S. social media platforms.
“I don’t think ownership is the issue here,” he said during the hearing. “U.S. social companies do not have a good history with data privacy and user security.”
