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Shou Zi Chew

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Entrepreneur

The Resume

    (January 1, 1983- )
    Born in Singapore
    Investment banker and venture capitalist
    CEO of TikTok (appointed in April, 2021)
    Testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee (March 23, 2023)

Why he might be annoying:

    It seems safe to say that if TikTok does not get banned in the United States, it will not be thanks to his performance before the Committee.
    His attempts to distance TikTok from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, were not helped by his former status as ByteDance's CFO or his continued ownership of shares of ByteDance.
    He kept hyping the in-progress Project Texas firewall despite multiple Representatives declaring that it was insufficient to assuage their security concerns.
    His claims that the Chinese government never expressed interest in accessing TikTok's user data were widely dismissed as unbelievable.
    He said about a ByteDance internal audit team using TikTok data to try to identify sources leaking information to journalists, 'I don't think spying is the right way to describe it.'
    He is rumored to have little actual power, with ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming allegedly making the big decisions for TikTok.

Why he might not be annoying:

    He was a summer intern at Facebook when it was a start-up.
    He pointed out that TikTok's data collection is no more extensive than that of YouTube or Instagram.
    He produced a rare moment of bipartisan agreement in Congress.
    Many of the Representatives at the hearing were clearly more interested in grandstanding than discussing the issues.
    Chinese media depicted him as a hero standing up to anti-Chinese bullying.

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 36 Votes: 50.0% Annoying