TikTok is Facebook's main competitor. The TikTok CEO started his career with Facebook. When TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew Mark started his career, he worked for Mark Zuckerberg as an intern for Facebook.
Born in Singapore, Chu earned a bachelor's degree in economics from University College London and an MBA from Harvard Business School. While studying at Harvard, he interned at the new company Facebook.
Chu started his tech career at Facebook and later worked in London, Singapore and Hong Kong. He finally arrived in Beijing. In 2015, Chu joined the Chinese tech company Xiaomi as Chief Financial Officer (CFO). In 2018, Chu had a key role in taking Xiaomi public.
Chu first joined TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, as CFO in 2021. Later that same year, he became the CEO of TikTok. At one time, Chu held the positions of ByteDance's CFO and TikTok's CEO simultaneously, but he later turned his full attention to TikTok.
With 150 million active users in the United States alone and 1 billion worldwide, TikTok is a rare major social media platform that is not under Zuckerberg's control.
In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg tried to get musical.ly. It was a popular social media app in the United States. ByteDance later spent $800 million on the musical.ly in 2017. Later, musical.ly, was merged into TikTok, and then this social network experienced spectacular growth.
Meta released an app called Lasso to replace TikTok in 2018, but it wasn't a success. The app was discontinued in 2020.
As efforts to ban TikTok intensified in the United States, criticism of Zuckerberg also increased. Zuckerberg has previously hinted that TikTok could be a threat to global free expression. In 2020, he said banning TikTok could set a wrong precedent, but added that national security concerns were supported.
