WASHINGTON: As the Chinse-based video-sharing app TikTok is facing a ban in the United States over charges of sharing users’ data with the Chinese government, the spotlight has now fallen on its enigmatic chief executive Shou Zi Chew, who is facing a grill by a congressional committee on Thursday (today).
On Thursday, the 40-year-old Singaporean will testify before the United States House Energy and Commerce Committee about the app’s data security and privacy practices and alleged ties to Beijing, the BBC said.
Little is known about how he operates and even how much power he truly wield at the company.
Chief operating officer Vanessa Pappas had been the public face of TikTok and was grilled by US Congress last September about US data flows to China.
TikTok app
A New York Times profile the previous September, citing former TikTok and ByteDance executives, suggested that Chew’s ability to make decisions was limited and that ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming rules the roost at the company.
But TikTok is now putting Chew front and centre publicly at a time when TikTok’s alleged connections to the Chinese government were under great scrutiny.
In a letter to US lawmakers stressing that it operates autonomously of parent company ByteDance, the company noted last June that Chew was not from China, but he is a Singaporean.
Born and raised in Singapore, he attended an elite Chinese-language school and is fluent in English and Mandarin. He was an officer in Singapore’s army, a prestigious posting while serving his military conscription.
Chew obtained a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University College London before heading to Harvard Business School. He earned an MBA and interned at social media giant Facebook while still a start-up.
According to some media reports, he had a five-year stint at investment firm DST, where he led a team and became an early investor in ByteDance in 2013. He worked as an investment banker at UK’s Goldman Sachs for two years.
Chew then played an important role at Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi, where he was its chief financial officer and global business president, and shepherded it through its public listing in 2018.
He jumped ship to ByteDance in 2021, becoming the first person to fill the role of the chief financial officer at the social media giant.
Just two months later, Chew stepped into the role of TikTok app CEO in the wake of his predecessor Kevin Mayer’s abrupt resignation amid the Trump government’s attempts to force a sale of TikTok’s United States (US) assets.
