Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok, is currently in the spotlight amid growing scepticism of the Chinese app around the world. The app is currently running the risk of being banned across the United States.
On Thursday (March 23), the 40-year-old Singaporean will give testimony before the US House Energy and Commerce Committee on the app’s data security and privacy policies, as well as its suspected connections to China, reported the BBC.
The public face of TikTok, chief operating officer Vanessa Pappas, was questioned by Congress in 2022 over US data flows to China.
The company made a point of mentioning that Chew is not from China but rather is “a Singaporean based in Singapore” in a letter sent to MPs last June, underlining that it acts independently of parent company ByteDance.
Chew, who leads one of the best-known apps in the world but is comparatively obscure, will be required to defend TikTok before some of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s more scathing critics.
In an interview from the firm’s WeWork headquarters in Washington, he stated that he does not see Thursday’s meeting as a last-ditch attempt to save TikTok’s US operations, but rather as an opportunity to explain what the company is attempting to do and to gather feedback from Congress members, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
“I look at it as an opportunity to do that, not a do-or-die” moment, he said.
Shou Zi Chew’s early days
Born and raised in Singapore, Chew went to a prestigious Chinese-language school and speaks both Mandarin and English well. While completing his military conscription, he held the honourable position of officer in Singapore’s armed services.
Prior to enrolling at Harvard Business School, where he earned an MBA and served as an intern at social media giant Facebook when it was still a start-up, Chew graduated from University College London with a bachelor’s in economics, as per BBC reports.
He reportedly spent five years working for the investment firm DST Global, where he led a team that invested early in ByteDance in 2013.
Furthermore, he spent two years working as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs.
The Chinese smartphone powerhouse Xiaomi, where Chew later served as its chief financial officer and president of its international business, hired him to lead it through its 2018 IPO.
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In March 2021, he left the company and joined ByteDance, where he was the first to hold the position of chief financial officer.
He took over as TikTok CEO two months later, after his predecessor Kevin Mayer abruptly resigned due to the Trump administration’s efforts to force the sale of TikTok’s US assets.
In February 2022, almost a year after assuming charge of the platform, he created his own TikTok account, @shou.time to share snippets of his personal life. Since then, Chew’s over 18,000 followers have seen him at the Super Bowl and NBA games, meeting public figures like Bill Murray, and painfully attempting to dance with singer Ciara.
He has worked the media circuit, sharing in interviews his love of golf and admiration for comic Kevin Hart. The father of two, who is married to Vivian Kao, the head of an investment firm, has also stated that he does not let his kids use TikTok because they are “too young.”
Challenging road ahead
As US politicians demand TikTok transfer control of its US assets or face a ban, Chew is currently faced with one of the biggest challenges of his career.
The issue has also been a source of contention for the Chinese.
The TikTok ban campaign is being driven by a “toxic American political atmosphere,” according to an opinion piece published on Tuesday by the state-run Global Times, and it would go against free market principles. TikTok’s Chinese origin is considered an “original sin” by US officials and lawmakers, it said.
TikTok announced it will hire Oracle Corp. to independently monitor against any intervention from Beijing as part of a billion-dollar investment plan to separate the app from its Chinese owners, reported the Wall Street Journal. The company claims that the procedures represent an unprecedented effort to reassure Americans that their data is secure.
Washington has banned TikTok, despite the fact that it is still quite popular nationwide. On Tuesday, Chew personally addressed US users in a TikTok video, drawing their attention to the potential ban. He claimed in the video that the app has 150 million US users, or nearly half the country’s population.
