TikTok CEO Used To Work As An Intern At Facebook: Now He’s Meta’s Fiercest Rival TikTok has now emerged as the biggest competitor for Mark Zuckerberg. The CEO of TikTok is Shou Ji Chew. That is, Chew is Zuckerberg’s biggest rival. But at the beginning of his career, he worked as an intern for Zuckerberg at Facebook.
The Singaporean had a degree in economics from University College London. He then went on to do an MBA from Harvard Business School. This was around 2010. At the time, he interned at a startup in the area. The company was called Facebook Inc.
“That summer, I was also working at a startup,” Chew said with a laugh in an interview with the Harvard Business School alumni website. “It was called Facebook.”
At the time, he was working as the chief financial officer at Xiaomi.
Then in 2021, Chew’s career took a turn to compete with Meta CEO Zuckerberg. Chew joined TikTok’s parent company ByteDance in 2021 as the chief financial officer. Later that year, he became TikTok’s CEO. He held both the positions of chief financial officer at ByteDance and CEO of TikTok. But he later stepped down as CEO to focus solely on the short video platform.
The same Chew runs TikTok, which has over 150 million monthly active users in the United States and over a billion users worldwide. TikTok now tops the list of major social media platforms.
However, Zuckerberg gave up on ByteDance. ByteDance bought the app for $800 million in 2017. ByteDance merged Musically with the already existing TikTok platform, and as a result, TikTok emerged as Facebook’s arch-rival in the social media arena.
Zuckerberg was not one to give up. When the weapon of eliminating the rival by buying it failed, he decided to create another weapon, namely a similar app. And, Mark Zuckerberg’s company, which has been merged with Facebook Inc., launched an app called ‘Lasso’ as a competitor to TikTok in 2018. But it never succeeded.
In recent years, there have been increasing attempts to ban TikTok from the US. Zuckerberg has also begun to criticize the app. Zuckerberg had previously said that TikTok could threaten freedom of expression globally on social media.
In 2020, he said that banning the app could set a wrong precedent, but argued that it was appropriate to close it, saying that he agreed with the national security concerns. According to BuzzFeed News, Zuckerberg said in an internal meeting in 2020, “I think that an app that keeps a lot of people’s data and follows the rules of another country, a government that is seen as a competitor, naturally raises questions about national security.”
At a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in 2023, Chew mocked Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, saying TikTok did not collect more data than US social media platforms. “I don’t think it’s an ownership issue,” he told the hearing. “US social media companies don’t have a good history of data privacy and user security.”
