A 40-year-old Singaporean corporate executive appeared before the US House Energy and Commerce Committee in a wood-paneled hearing chamber in Washington, D.C., in March 2023. Members of Congress questioned him for hours, ranging from sincerely interested to outright hostile. Protesters carried signs outside.
While defending a platform owned by a Beijing-based company in a time of intense technological mistrust between the United States and China, Shou Zi Chew sat calmly, testified for over five hours, and managed to convey the awkward reality that TikTok’s CEO is not Chinese, does not reside in China, and is not personally accountable for the decisions of the Chinese government. By most accounts, the task was unachievable. Even his detractors were impressed by how calmly he handled the situation.
For the past five years, Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok, has held one of the most unusual leadership positions in the technology sector. In 2021, he took over for Kevin Mayer, who had only been in the position for four months before leaving amid the initial round of pressure from the US government.
Chew had a background in finance rather than consumer technology, having worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, interned at what was then Facebook, and served as CFO at Xiaomi, a Chinese smartphone manufacturer, from 2015 until ByteDance hired him. He was not trained as an engineer. According to most accounts, he is a diplomat and a dealmaker, which proved to be more helpful in the TikTok position than technical know-how.
When Congress enacted and the Supreme Court affirmed a statute requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations or risk a ban, TikTok went dark for several hours in January 2025, sparking the crisis that marked his reign. Chew had personally met with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in December 2024 as part of his months-long lobbying efforts against the law. He was invited to Trump’s inauguration and given a seat on the dais, which is usually reserved for senior dignitaries and former presidents.
This indicated how seriously the incoming administration took the issue of TikTok’s future in the United States. After Trump signed a temporary executive order granting a respite, the app was restored in a matter of hours. In a calm, forward-thinking internal memo, Chew informed his workers of the decision, as though he hadn’t just witnessed his site go black in front of a billion users.
The resolution came in January 2026 with the official closure of TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, a structure that included Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX, the state investment firm of Abu Dhabi, as co-owners, each holding 15 percent of the company. ByteDance kept 19.9 percent, while current investors held the remaining shares.
The dual-leadership system, which had more operational nuance than most of the media recognized, saw Adam Presser appointed as CEO of the U.S. unit while Chew remained as global CEO. It’s still unclear how precisely that separation of powers operates in reality and whether having two CEOs for a single platform leads to conflict or clarity. However, the agreement put an end to four years of political and legal uncertainty, and Chew remained consistent throughout.
He is married to Taiwanese American businesswoman Vivian Kao, whom he met while attending Harvard Business School, where he received his MBA. When TikTok was the main sponsor of the 2024 Met Gala, he acted as honorary chair. This event garnered different public attention than a congressional hearing, but it was still a conscious decision about how to place the platform in American culture.
As you see Chew handle each of those appearances—one on the red carpet, one under oath—you get the impression that his unique career path—from Singapore to Goldman to Beijing to Washington—prepared him for a version of the position that no one who hired him could have really predicted.
