2026 Hurun Rich List: Zhang Yiming Returns to Top Spot with 670 Billion Yuan, DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng Enters Top Ten for First Time with 280 Billion Yuan

Every year, the release of the rich list is the most intuitive slice for observing industrial change.

On October 27, the Hurun Research Institute released the "2026 Hurun China Rich List." This list is extremely brutal, and it also reflects with extreme authenticity the dramatic folding of China's current technology and business landscape.

The most eye-catching data points are three: First, Zhang Yiming, the 43-year-old founder of ByteDance, with wealth of 670 billion yuan, was named China's richest person for the second time. His wealth surged 43% in a single year, directly breaking the wealth record for China's richest person. Second, Liang Wenfeng, the 41-year-old founder of DeepSeek, with a net worth of 280 billion yuan, entered the top ten for the first time, ranking seventh. This is a "new rich" who rose purely on the strength of foundational large-model technology. Third, Ma Huateng, the 55-year-old founder of Tencent, saw his wealth shrink 26% (to 346 billion yuan) and formally fell out of the top three.

From Zhang Yiming's surge and Liang Wenfeng's surprise attack to Ma Huateng's retreat, this list is not merely a change in a few numbers; it is a declaration: the old gods belonging to the mobile internet are abdicating, and the new kings led by large models and AI applications have completely taken over the scepter of wealth.

In his analysis of the list, Hurun said bluntly: "AI is the single largest wealth growth engine this year; one in every 10 listees has wealth derived from the AI track." This is not only a change in rankings, but a switch in the underlying logic of wealth creation.

That Zhang Yiming could reach the top for the second time at age 43 and with a scale of 670 billion yuan depended absolutely not on luck, but on ByteDance's terrifying ability in this era to monetize across the entire industrial chain.

In many people's stereotypes, ByteDance is still that short-video company harvesting traffic through Douyin and TikTok. But if you break down the cards in Zhang Yiming's hand, you will find that ByteDance has long since completed its evolution into an "AI super factory."

According to list materials and public information, Zhang Yiming's core assets include not only Douyin and TikTok, the two globally top-tier traffic pools, but also Doubao (one of the AI-native applications with the highest daily active users in China), Hongguo Short Dramas (a newly rising money-making beast whose daily active users are approaching 200 million thanks to extremely low cost and algorithmic distribution), Fanqie Novels (a massive library of online-literature IP) and Douyin E-commerce and Douyin Mall (a super engine that completes the commercial transaction loop).

And what strings all this together are the underlying Doubao large model and the Ocean Engine responsible for commercialization and monetization.

This forms a seamless AI business loop: * Content production end: Fanqie Novels provides data-validated IP, the Doubao large model serves as a cheap and tireless "super screenwriter" for adaptation, and ByteDance's video generation models are then used to directly produce content; * Distribution end: platforms such as Douyin and Hongguo use extremely mature recommendation algorithms to push this content precisely to target users; * Monetization end: Ocean Engine completes the final harvest through advertising traffic buying and Douyin E-commerce.

Zhang Yiming's victory is the perfect victory of "algorithms + AI applications + commercialization." In the past, internet companies sold advertising based on traffic; now, Zhang Yiming uses AI to greatly improve traffic distribution efficiency, uses large models to generate massive amounts of content, and then uses an extremely mature commercialization engine to monetize it. In this loop, ByteDance is like a money-printing machine running madly, and Zhang Yiming is precisely the sole helmsman of this machine.

Liang Wenfeng's surprise attack: a pure myth of "wealth created by technology"

If Zhang Yiming is the overlord of the application layer, then Liang Wenfeng's first entry into the top ten represents the enormous explosive power of hardcore foundational technology in this era.

Liang Wenfeng, 41, ranks seventh with wealth of 280 billion yuan. You should know that the vast majority of the rich on this list built their wealth through more than a decade or even decades of accumulation in real industries. Yet Liang Wenfeng's wealth explosion took only a short two or three years.

As the founder of High-Flyer Quant, Liang Wenfeng entered the large-model track with abundant capital and tens of thousands of GPUs and founded DeepSeek. He took an extremely lonely and extremely hardcore path: not rushing into commercialization, not blindly burning money to buy traffic, but relentlessly focusing on underlying architecture optimization and training open-source models comparable to the world's top level at extremely low cost.

DeepSeek's V2, V3 and even later versions not only overturned the API price war in China and sharply reduced inference costs across the industry, but also won extremely high reputations in the global open-source community. Even Silicon Valley giants such as xAI and Nvidia are closely watching its technical route.

You do not need to have billions of daily active users like ByteDance; as long as you master ultimate model efficiency and can become the industry's underlying infrastructure, capital will offer you sky-high valuations. Liang Wenfeng's 280 billion is not only recognition of his personal wealth, but also the strongest signal of the Chinese AI industry's transformation from "model innovation" to "hard-tech innovation."

Ma Huateng's retreat: the old giant's twilight and turn

Where there are newcomers laughing, there are old hands worrying.

Ma Huateng fell out of the top three with a net worth of 346 billion yuan, as his wealth shrank 26%. This does not mean Tencent is declining. Tencent still controls WeChat and QQ and remains one of the world's most profitable gaming companies. But in this wave of large models, Tencent's pace appears relatively restrained.

As we analyzed in previous articles, Tencent's Hunyuan large model has been suppressed in volume by Doubao and DeepSeek. WeChat's huge and complex social ecosystem makes Tencent extremely cautious in integrating AI, for fear of damaging the national-level product experience it worked so hard to build.

This has created an awkward situation: in the new incremental market of AI, although Tencent has not fallen behind, it has also not reaped the richest and most dominant dividends of the era in the way ByteDance and DeepSeek have.

Ma Huateng's shrinking wealth is less a crisis for Tencent than an inevitability as the gears of the times turn. When the valuation logic of the capital market shifts from "traffic scale and social networks" to "computing power scale and model capability," old giants are bound to go through a period of growing pains.

The slowdown of traditional physical industries and new energy

Stepping outside the tech circle, the changes in the wealth structure of the entire list are equally thought-provoking.

Zhong Shanshan, founder of Nongfu Spring, who sat firmly in the front ranks in past years, saw his wealth shrink by 120 billion yuan this year, dropping to second place with 410 billion yuan; Zeng Yuqun of CATL ranked third with 385 billion yuan. Although consumer goods and new energy are the cornerstones of the real economy, in the face of the breakneck rise of AI large models, their wealth growth has clearly slowed.

A complete reconstruction of the logic of wealth

Setting aside the rivalries among the top three on the list, the 2026 Hurun Rich List reveals a deeper trend: the underlying logic of wealth in China has been completely reconstructed by AI.

Over the past decade or so, the wealth-creation myths of the internet mainly relied on traffic dividends and business model innovation. As long as you could build a national-level app, you could make a fortune through advertising and e-commerce.

But now, the times have changed. AI is reshaping everything. ByteDance has used AI to reshape the content industry chain, and DeepSeek has used AI to upend the cost structure of computing power. Zhang Yiming and Liang Wenfeng, with their solid surges in wealth, have proved to the world that in this era, whoever can command the largest computing power, whoever can train the smartest models, and whoever can seamlessly embed AI into the apps used by hundreds of millions of people every day can stand at the very top of the wealth pyramid.

Conclusion: the era's true wealth-creation machine. In the rise and fall of the rich list, we see not only the gathering and scattering of wealth but also the cruel alternation of industry cycles.

Zhang Yiming's 670 billion yuan is a microcosm of the full prosperity of AI applications; Liang Wenfeng's 280 billion yuan is the reward for a hardcore breakthrough in underlying technology. And Ma Huateng's shrinking wealth silently reminds all entrepreneurs: in the face of epochal change, even if you are as powerful as Tencent, if you do not go all out to embrace new productive forces, you will be overtaken by latecomers on the wealth track.

This is no longer an era in which you can win lying down by relying on demographic dividends and traffic dividends. AI has become the core wealth-creation machine of this society. And those who can truly master AI technology and turn it into extreme efficiency are taking most of the cake that belongs to the future. For traditional enterprises still watching from the sidelines, this is not just a numbers game on a list; it is a survival rule that concerns life and death.