Meet Shou Zi Chew, TikTok's 40-year-old CEO who's entered the spotlight as he tries to defend the company from growing security concerns and ban threats
Shou Zi Chew led Apple competitor Xiaomi through a blockbuster IPO. Now, he's leading TikTok as it navigates the threat of bans amid explosive growth.
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- TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will testify before Congress this week as officials share security concerns about the Chinese-owned app.
- He's 40 years old, went to Harvard Business School, and interned at Facebook when it was a startup.
- Here's what else you need to know about the young tech executive.
TikTok is under a lot of scrutiny right now. World leaders, including President Biden, worry the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform is a danger to national security, and they're threatening it with nationwide bans.
So who's leading the company through this turbulent period?
CEO Shou Zi Chew is 40 years old, from Singapore, and got his start as an intern at Facebook.
Here's a rundown on TikTok's head honcho:
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He earned his bachelor's degree in economics at the University College London before heading to Harvard Business School for his MBA in 2010.
While a student there, Chew worked for a startup that "was called Facebook," he said in a post on Harvard's Alumni website. Facebook went public in mid-2012.
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They are "a couple who often finish each other's sentences," according to the school's alumni page, and have two kids.
REUTERS/Bobby Yip
He became chief financial officer of the Chinese smartphone giant, which competes with Apple, in 2015. Chew helped secure crucial financing and led the company through its 2018 public listing, which would become one of the nation's largest tech IPOs in history.
Matt McClain/The Washington Post/Getty Images.
Before joining Xiaomi, Chew also worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs for two years, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He also worked at investment firm DST, founded by Israeli-Russian IT billionaire Yuri Milner, for five years. It was during his time there in 2013 that he led a team that became early investors in Bytedance, as the Business Chief and The Independent reported.
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Chew joined ByteDance's C-suite first in March 2021, the first person to fill the role of chief financial officer at the media giant.
He was named CEO of TikTok that May at the same time as Vanessa Pappas was named COO. Bytedance founder and CEO Zhang Yiming said at the time that Chew "brings deep knowledge of the company and industry, having led a team that was among our earliest investors, and having worked in the technology sector for a decade."
That November, it was announced that Chew would leave his role as ByteDance's CFO to focus on running TikTok.
TikTok's former CEO, Kevin Mayer, had left Walt Disney for the position in May 2020 and quit after three months as the company faced pressure from lawmakers over security risks.
Jacquelyn Martin, Pool
Former President Donald Trump's administration issued executive orders designed to force ByteDance into divesting its TikTok US operations, though nothing ever happened; President Joe Biden signed an executive order in June 2021 that threw out Trump's proposed bans on the app.
Fast forward to this month, and the Biden administration is demanding TikTok divest its American business from its Chinese parent company, or else risk being banned in the US. In response, Chew said such a divestment wouldn't solve officials' security concerns surrounding TikTok.
TikTok
"Some politicians have started talking about banning TikTok," he said. "Now this could take TikTok away from all 150 million of you."
Chew will testify before Congress on Thursday about the company's privacy and data security practices.