Tencent has relatively low name recognition outside of China—despite being the world's biggest video game publisher—operating a 1.4-billion-user messaging network, and holding more than 80 companies with valuations exceeding $1B.

See a breakdown of every single video game Tencent has invested in.

Watch a timeline of Tencent—one of China's earliest tech giants—despite the company's low profile.

Read an overview of Tencent's biggest business moments, from the 2011 WeChat launch to streaming deal with Universal Music Group.

In 2018, Tencent's market capitalization hit $580B, surpassing Facebook (now Meta) for the first time.

See a breakdown of Tencent's revenue streams, which include fintech, advertising, games, and social.

Read a breakdown of WeChat, the central technology in Tencent's empire that boasts roughly 1.4 billion users and hosts e-commerce, payment, and messaging services all in one place.

Listen to an interview with Tencent's chief financial officer Arthur Wang to hear how the company is leveraging to AI to stay ahead of the technological curve.

Watch a tour of Tencent's sprawling headquarters, focused on tech and health, located in China.

Understanding TikTok-owner ByteDance's business model

ByteDance has ridden TikTok's major success to become the world's most valuable startup. This deep dive showcases some of the company's smartest moves and tactics, and where it's headed next.

The TikTok sale went through in January 2026

The app's ownership is now majority American, though TikTok CEO Shou Chew, who is Chinese, remains on the board of directors. It's unclear what, if anything, has changed for American users, as the company has historically kept the specifics of its algorithm a secret.

The world's 50 most valuable private companies

While public companies typically have the highest valuations, private companies get close. This list breaks down the top 50 as of 2025, with SpaceX at the top with a value of $350B, followed by ByteDance. Over three-fifths of the list are located in the US, with eight in China.

TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms of all time

Centered around user-generated short videos, the platform was created by the Chinese technology company ByteDance Ltd. With over 1.8 billion users, the app has become a global force.

WeChat has become China's primary news platform, due to expansive user base and legacy media's adoption of the platform.

Created when Tencent launched the first version of its internet messaging platform, QQ, the company's winking penguin has become a ubiquitous cultural presence in China.

Owned by Tencent, WeBank was China's first digital bank and services 340 million customers.

Listen to a podcast episode that explains how the Chinese discount e-commerce retailer Temu became one of the most downloaded apps in the US.

TikTok boasts nearly 1.8B monthly users

The app has surged in popularity recently, with usage surging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those users have generated high revenues, too, with over $23B in 2024.

A timeline and visuals on TikTok's rapid growth

The app that would become TikTok is known as Douyin in China, and this article recounts its history, acquisition of rival Musical.ly, and rebranding ahead of its lightning growth. One visualization shows how quickly TikTok reached 1B users.

What's the difference between QQ, WeChat, and Weixin?

Tencent owns QQ, Weixin, and WeChat—three separate apps serving different users. QQ launched in 1999 as a youth-focused messenger. Weixin (for China) and WeChat (international) are technically the same app, but split to comply with regional regulations, especially around data and payments.

How TSMC, the world's biggest chip manufacturer, makes money

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has more than 500 clients across the world, but none are bigger or more consequential to its business than Apple. The iPhone maker accounts for 25% of TSMC's total revenue. TSMC controls more than 60% of the global market share in semiconductor manufacturing. Dive into the economics and outlook of this important company here.

Creating a digital alternative to the traditional Chinese 'red envelope' payments helped spur WeChat's financial services growth, and helped it become a 'superapp.'

Temu was born out of a Chinese company that, at the time, was called Pinduoduo

Today, the company is called PDD Holdings, and owns both Temu and its very similar sister app in China, Pinduoduo.

Former Temu CEO Colin Huang is among China's richest people

With a $43.3B net worth as of September 2025, Huang was the founder of PDD Holdings, Temu’s parent company.

Walmart was the first traditional retailer to crack the $1T club

In early 2026, the company joined major tech companies Nvidia, Apple, and Meta (among others) as one of the rare firms with a market capitalization beyond $1T. See the latest top companies here.

TikTok explained: how the app became a global phenomenon

Since 2018, the short-form, video-sharing app TikTok has gone from launching in the US to becoming a habit-forming cultural force that’s signed up more than half of the country's population as users.

The evolution of X, from startup to Musk-owned giant, reflects rapid tech shifts

Twitter began in 2006 as a side project and grew into a major global platform, widely used for news, activism, and political discourse. Despite mainstream success, it faced ongoing management turmoil, business struggles, and rising concerns over misinformation and user safety.

In 2025, ByteDance agreed to sell the app's US branch

In 2024, US lawmakers passed a requirement for parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban in the country, which the company challenged in court. After several extensions granted by President Trump, ByteDance agreed to sell the company's US branch to a group of US investors, including Oracle, which will oversee the app's security and cloud computing.

Many of the top companies in the US by market cap began as tech startups

Combined, the top seven companies by market cap in the US as of December 2024—Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla—were worth more than $16T at the time.

In 2018, Apple became the world's first publicly traded trillion-dollar company

The valuation was made possible by Steve Jobs' return to the company in 1997, who implemented a simplification strategy by cutting the majority of Apple's existing product line. His promotion of Jony Ive to SVP of industrial design would help popularize Apple through colorful products and marketing.

TikTok's 'sonic logo' imprints the app's identity across platforms

As the app's popular videos spread to other platforms like Instagram and Reddit, the company sought a way to alert viewers that the content originated on TikTok. They decided on the sonic logo that now acts as a bumper on all of its shared videos, to attract users.

TikTok doesn't exist in China

TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance Ltd., yet only the platform’s sister app Douyin is available in China. That's because the Chinese government regularly censors Douyin—something ByteDance likely believes would degrade TikTok, its international app.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew on its future

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew dives into how the trendsetting video app and cultural phenomenon works, from what distinguishes its algorithm and drives viral videos, to the challenges of content moderation and digital addiction in this wide-ranging conversation with the head of TED, Chris Anderson.

In 2024, global ad spend surpassed $1T for the first time

Organizations like GroupM and WARC began predicting this record high in 2023. Five large tech companies (Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Alibaba, and TikTok parent ByteDance) were predicted to account for more than half of all global ad spend in 2024.

Meta Platforms Inc., which owns both Facebook and Instagram, is the largest social media company in the world.

One Facebook investor turned $500K into $1B

Peter Thiel was Facebook's first big investor. In 2004, he invested $500K into the social network, long before the company owned Instagram or renamed itself "Meta." In 2012, when he sold off most of his stake, he turned that initial $500K investment into more than $1B in cash.

Twitch is a live-streaming platform popularized via the broadcast of esports events and users playing video games.

Nvidia was founded in a Denny's restaurant

Nvidia is one of a handful of companies valued at more than $1T. In its early days, the semiconductor company sold GPUs, or graphics processing units, that were used for video games. But in recent years, Nvidia's chips have been used for crypto and AI. Nvidia has faced several setbacks on its journey, including when the US sanctioned chip exports to China.

TikTok's top 10 users have over 1B followers

Influencers like Charli D'Amelio and MrBeast, as well as more traditional stars like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, produce content that keep people scrolling.

What Trump's second 75-day extension means for TikTok sale

After President Trump took office in January 2025, he offered TikTok the opportunity to find a US company to buy the app within 75 days. In the meantime, the app continued operating. In April, Trump extended that deadline by an additional 75 days. This BBC article breaks down what that means for the company's potential buyers and for its users.

Douyin is a dominant channel for government propaganda

Driven by strict censorship rules, ByteDance Ltd. spun off TikTok from its sister app Douyin—the version available in China—in order to flourish in international markets. This “60 Minutes” report compares the apps side by side.

China is making a deliberate push towards becoming a cashless society, making digital payment services like Tencent's WeBank even more valuable.

Less than half of TikTok's US users have posted a video

Like most platforms, content is driven by a small number of active users—in TikTok's case, 25% of accounts are responsible for an estimated 98% of content posted.

By 2024, Nvidia had become one of the world’s most valuable companies

Nvidia started as a graphics chip designer for PCs and consoles. This explainer traces its rise from early GPU innovation to powering AI breakthroughs and fueling the data centers behind today’s biggest tech platforms.

See Bloomberg's continuously updated Billionaire Index

This ranking, updated daily, shows a running tally of the world's 500 richest people. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has largely been atop the list, with a net worth of around $723B as of June 2026. Values fluctuate significantly as much of the wealth is tied to equity in companies. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

View the growth of Claude in the US following its fallout with the Pentagon

Data from Appfigures shows that downloads of the Claude mobile app surpassed ChatGPT's for the first time in March 2026, while Similarweb reported that daily active user totals rose from 5 million the previous month to 11.3 million. Claude's web traffic was already up 297.7% year over year in February.

The early success of Facebook made Mark Zuckerberg a college campus celebrity

Within 24 hours of launching in 2004, more than 1,200 Harvard students signed up to the platform, which quickly expanded to other Ivy League and Boston-area schools within months. By year's end, Zuckerberg left Harvard to run the company in California.

The top 100 companies in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley has pumped out some of the biggest companies in the world, including Apple, Meta, and Google. Thousands of companies operate in the area, ranging from valuations in the trillions to startups only worth thousands.

Blackstone acquired a majority stake in Bumble's former parent company in 2019 ahead of the dating app's IPO

The New York City-based investment management company paid about $3B for its stake in female-focused dating app Bumble. The app's 2021 IPO that made Bumble Founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd a billionaire at age 31 proved lucrative for Blackstone as well.

A 'unicorn' is a private company with a $1B-plus valuation

Just like a horse with a spiraling horn on its head, private companies with a more than $1B valuation are rare creatures. But unlike the mythical creature, this type of “unicorn” is occasionally spotted in the wild. Unicorn companies include SpaceX, OpenAI, Skims, and more.

How TikTok ate the internet

TikTok is now deeply integrated into American culture, thanks to the app’s powerful algorithm and focus on entertainment which have influenced popular trends and social media content consumption in the US. This immersive piece highlights TikTok’s role in helping shape everything from music to fashion and even politics in the US—while its connection to China has also drawn scrutiny and raised national security concerns.