Ask random people in India who the top 10 richest men in Asia are, and most will say Mukesh Ambani or Gautam Adani. In mid-September 2026, that answer changed. ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming, the man behind TikTok, moved past Adani to become Asia’s richest person for the first time, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He is only 43 and keeps a very low profile, yet he is now ahead of two of India’s biggest industrialists.
So who else makes the list of Asia’s top 10 richest men in 2026, and how did they build their fortunes? Here are all ten, ranked, along with the stories behind the numbers.
Why every list tells a different story
Before the names, one thing is worth knowing: there is no single official ranking of Asia’s top 10 richest men. Bloomberg and Forbes both track the world’s richest people, and their numbers can differ by billions. On the day Zhang topped Bloomberg’s Asia ranking at about $105 billion, Forbes’ real-time list valued him at roughly $84 billion. Each list has its own method for valuing shares and private companies, and most of these fortunes are made of exactly that.
This article follows the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as it stood in mid-September 2026. All amounts are in US dollars, and they move every day with the stock market, so the order of the top few can change within weeks.
Asia’s top 10 richest men at a glance
| Rank | Name | Country / territory | Main company | Net worth (US$ billion) |
| 1 | Zhang Yiming | China | ByteDance (TikTok) | $105.5B |
| 2 | Gautam Adani | India | Adani Group | $104.8B |
| 3 | Mukesh Ambani | India | Reliance Industries | $84.2B |
| 4 | Tadashi Yanai | China | Fast Retailing (Uniqlo) | $63.7B |
| 5 | Zhong Shanshan | China | Nongfu Spring | $59.1B |
| 6 | Masayoshi Son | Japan | SoftBank Group | $53.9B |
| 7 | Zeng Yuqun (Robin Zeng) | Hong Kong | CATL | $52.2B |
| 8 | Li Ka-shing | Hong Kong | CK Hutchison, CK Asset | $46.9B |
| 9 | Ma Huateng (Pony Ma) | China | Tencent | about $46.3B |
| 10 | He Xiangjian | China | Midea Group | 44.2 |
Source: Bloomberg’s and Forbes’ estimate from 2026
The big three: TikTok founder and two Indian titans
1. Zhang Yiming: the quiet founder behind TikTok
In March 2019, Bloomberg first put a number on Zhang Yiming’s wealth: $13 billion. Seven years later it is about $105.5 billion, and more than $40 billion of that arrived in 2026 alone, which is why he now sits at the top of the top 10 richest men list.
Zhang, 43, founded ByteDance in 2012. It owns TikTok and its Chinese version, Douyin. He studied microelectronics and software engineering at Nankai University, stepped down as chief executive in 2021, and is known for staying out of the spotlight.
Two things pushed him to the top 10 richest men list. In January, a deal settled TikTok’s future in the US through a joint venture involving Oracle and Silver Lake. And ByteDance has been spending heavily on artificial intelligence. In the first half of September, his fortune jumped by more than $12 billion after Bloomberg reviewed new company valuations from investors including BlackRock, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price.
2. Gautam Adani: a great year, and he still lost the top spot.
Adani, 64, started with a small commodities trading business and built it into a group that runs ports, airports, power plants, renewable energy projects, logistics and cement. His fortune touched around $120 billion in June, then fell after a stock index change and a market sell-off linked to rising oil prices. In mid-September he stood at about $104.8 billion, just behind Zhang.
He has been recovering. Bloomberg’s index showed about $107 billion on 21 October, so this race is far from over. And investors still want in: in September, Adani Enterprises agreed to sell up to 5.54% of its airport business to buyers including Temasek and BlackRock-managed funds, valuing the unit at roughly $18 billion before the new money.
3. Mukesh Ambani: India’s best-known tycoon, now third
In March, Forbes’ annual list still named Mukesh Ambani Asia’s richest man, at $99.7 billion. By September, Bloomberg ranked him third. Still maintaining his name in the top 10 richest men.
Ambani, 69, chairs Reliance Industries, India’s largest private-sector company, founded by his father Dhirubhai in 1966. Under Mukesh, it grew from oil refining and petrochemicals into telecom, through Jio, and into retail. Bloomberg put his fortune at $84.2 billion in July, mostly from his stake of about 42% in Reliance and about 41% of Jio Financial Services.
A fun detail: Bloomberg values his 27-storey Mumbai home, Antilia, at just over $400 million, far below the $1 billion or more that media reports say it cost to build.
Ranks 4 to 6: Uniqlo, bottled water and AI bets
4. Tadashi Yanai: the tailor’s son behind Uniqlo
If you own a Uniqlo T-shirt, you have helped make Tadashi Yanai in the top 10 richest men list. He is 77 and was born in southern Japan in 1949, the son of a tailor. After university he joined his father’s clothing business, and in 1984 he opened the first Uniqlo store in Hiroshima. The company later became Fast Retailing.
Bloomberg puts his fortune at about $63.7 billion. Yanai was Japan’s richest person for most of the past decade, until Masayoshi Son passed him in late 2025. Forbes Japan’s 2026 list shows his wealth rising by more than a third to $65 billion on strong sales and profit growth, yet he is still second to Son.
5. Zhong Shanshan: from mushroom farming to China’s “bottled water king”
Before he became a billionaire, Zhong Shanshan tried journalism, mushroom farming and healthcare. Today, at 71, he is better known as China’s “bottled water king”. He is also called the “Lone Wolf” because he stays out of politics and keeps his business separate from other rich families.
Most of his money comes from his 84.5% stake in Nongfu Spring, which had revenue of 52.6 billion yuan (about $7.3 billion) in 2025, and a 73% stake in Beijing Wantai, a maker of vaccines and hepatitis test kits. Bloomberg valued him at $59.1 billion in mid-September and $61.2 billion on 18 October. He was Asia’s richest person at the end of 2020, after Nongfu’s Hong Kong listing, and held the title of China’s richest for years until Zhang Yiming overtook him.
6. Masayoshi Son: the man betting billions on AI
Masayoshi Son believes the AI boom could be 50 times bigger than the dot-com boom, and he is investing heavily in it. SoftBank has put more than $30 billion into OpenAI and also holds a big stake in the chip designer Arm. Son, 69, was born on the Japanese island of Kyushu to a Korean immigrant family, studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and founded SoftBank in 1981 as a computer software distributor.
His wealth swings with SoftBank’s share price. Bloomberg showed it jumping 248% in 2025 to $55.1 billion. In June 2026, Forbes put him at $97 billion and called him Asia’s richest. By mid-September, Bloomberg had him at $53.9 billion. Different lists and different dates can give very different pictures of a fortune that rides on one volatile stock.
Ranks 7 to 10: EV batteries, property, WeChat and air conditioners
7. Zeng Yuqun: the physicist whose batteries power electric cars
Tesla, BMW and Volkswagen all buy batteries from CATL, a company founded by a physicist. Zeng Yuqun, also known as Robin Zeng, holds a doctorate in condensed matter physics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and grew up in a hillside village in Fujian province. Today he chairs CATL, the world’s largest maker of electric-vehicle batteries, and Bloomberg lists him as Hong Kong’s richest person, with about $52.2 billion.
He started a battery company, ATL, in 1999 and sold it to Japan’s TDK in 2005. He then built CALT, whose shares began trading in Shenzhen in 2018. The global shift to electric vehicles has been the engine of his fortune.
8. Li Ka-shing: 97 years old and still growing his wealth
At 97, Li Ka-shing is the oldest person on this list, and his fortune is still rising: Bloomberg has him up about $9 billion this year, to about $46.9 billion. He founded CK Hutchison, an infrastructure group, and CK Asset, a property and asset-management company. His son Victor took over as chairman of both in 2018. His wealth is held in cash and shares in listed companies, including CK Asset, CK Hutchison and the Canadian energy producer Cenovus.
Forbes’ Hong Kong rich list in February ranked him the city’s richest for a sixth year in a row, at $45.1 billion, even as his group faced scrutiny over the sale of its Panama ports business. Bloomberg’s profile adds a small detail: he still spends about 90 minutes a day playing golf and swimming.
9. Ma Huateng: the quiet billionaire behind WeChat
If you have ever used WeChat, you have used something Ma Huateng built. Ma, 54, co-founded Tencent in 1998 with a group of classmates in Shenzhen. Its first product was the chat app QQ, where he met his future wife. Today Tencent runs WeChat, which had about 1.4 billion monthly users in mid-2025, along with popular mobile games such as Honor of Kings. It reported revenue of 660.3 billion yuan (about $91.7 billion) in 2024, and Ma owns roughly 8% of the company.
Forbes estimated his fortune at about $46.3 billion in late July. Like Zhong Shanshan, he avoids the spotlight, which is the opposite of Alibaba’s outspoken Jack Ma.
10. He Xiangjian: the Midea founder who started with a lid workshop
In 2020, intruders broke into He Xiangjian’s home and held him hostage. His son escaped, swam across a lake to raise the alarm, and police rescued him. The man at the centre of that story is the founder of Midea Group, China’s biggest producer of air conditioners.
He, now 84, was born in 1942 in Shunde, Guangdong. In 1968 he and a group of local residents set up a small workshop making lids. At 38 he switched to electric fans and named the company Midea. It listed in Shenzhen in 1993 and added a Hong Kong listing in 2024, in a share sale worth about $4 billion, the city’s biggest in more than three years. He retired as chairman in 2012 but remains the largest shareholder, with about 31% of Midea Group. Bloomberg valued him at about $44.2 billion on 21 October. He is also an art collector who founded the He Art Museum, designed by the Pritzker Prize winner Tadao Ando.
What the top 10 richest men in Asia tell us about where wealth is going
The biggest story is where the new money is coming from. Three of the ten, Zhang Yiming, Masayoshi Son and Ma Huateng, made their fortunes mainly in technology or AI, and a tech founder now sits at the top. Bloomberg said as much when Zhang took the lead: fortunes linked to AI are rising above those built in older industries like ports, energy and retail. The age gap on the list shows the same shift. Zhang is 43 and has multiplied his wealth eightfold in seven years, while Li Ka-shing, at 97, built his empire over many decades.
Geography matters too. Greater China, meaning mainland China and Hong Kong, holds six of the ten places, India two and Japan two. That matches the bigger picture: according to Forbes’ 2026 list, China has 539 billionaires and India 229, the two highest counts in Asia.
So who will be Asia’s richest man by the end of year? These fortunes are mostly paper wealth, tied to share prices and company valuations, and Zhang and Adani are only a few billion dollars apart. The top spot could easily change hands again, which makes this list of the top 10 richest men in Asia worth checking again in a few weeks.
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Who is at the top of the top 10 richest men list right now?
Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, leads the top 10 richest men list with a fortune of about $105.5 billion, according to Bloomberg. He is 43 and founded the company in 2012.
Who is the richest man in India?
On Bloomberg’s index, it is Gautam Adani, at about $104.8 billion in mid-September. Mukesh Ambani was at $84.2 billion as of 23 July. On Forbes’ 2026 list in March, though, Ambani was the richest in Asia at $99.7 billion, which shows how the answer depends on the list and the date.
Which country has the most billionaires in Asia?
China, with 539 billionaires on Forbes’ 2026 list, followed by India with 229, according to Forbes’ 2026 billionaire rankings.
Can we generate long-term wealth from crypto?
Yes, it can be done, but there are no guarantees. Many investors build wealth over time by holding a coin for the long term or by investing small amounts regularly through a crypto SIP. Both options are available on Suncrypto. Crypto prices can move up and down quickly, so invest only what you can afford to lose.