The clock is ticking for TikTok: President Joe Biden just signed a bill requiring TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the popular social media app—or else face a ban. The TikTok divestment bill was bundled into a massive $95 billion aid package, which helped fast-track it through Congress. TikTok has vowed to sue over the bill, arguing that it amounts to restrictions on free speech.
Legislators introduced the bill to address concerns that the Chinese government, through TikTok’s Chinese owners, could be using the app to steal American users’ data and threaten national security. TikTok has repeatedly denied these claims and maintained that the American version of the app is sandboxed from the Chinese version, but recent Fortune reporting quotes former employees saying that they worked closely with Chinese staff and that the separation between U.S. and Chinese operations was largely cosmetic.
The bill doesn’t call for an outright ban. Under its terms, ByteDance would have 270 days to sell the app to a buyer who’s not associated with any foreign adversary of the U.S. If ByteDance doesn’t sell, then TikTok would be removed from app stores.
TikTok is one of the most popular social-media apps around—and with the possibility of a forced sale on the table, potential suitors are already preparing bids. Here are a few of the individuals and companies who have already been linked with a potential TikTok deal.
Steve Mnuchin
Former secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin made a splash last month when he announced his intention to put together a group of investors to buy TikTok. Mnuchin, who urged then-President Trump to block Chinese company ByteDance from acquiring TikTok back in 2020, could have the deep pockets and business connections to make a deal happen: A career banker, he recently made headlines for handing beleaguered New York Community Bancorp a $1 billion lifeline after investor concerns caused a huge stock selloff.
“I had President Trump sign an order that TikTok had to be sold, and I continue to believe that. So I think the legislation should pass … It’s a great business, and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok,” Mnuchin said on CNBC. “It should be owned by U.S. businesses. There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a U.S. company own something like this in China.”
Kevin O’Leary
The Shark Tank star announced his intention to make a bid last month if the proposed bill was passed, saying on Fox News, “If this order goes through, it’s got to be sold. I’m going to put up my hand and say, ‘I’ll buy it.’”
O’Leary noted that if ByteDance sold TikTok, he believed it would almost certainly not include the proprietary recommendation algorithm that powers its For You page and is one of its most valuable assets. O’Leary said in part because of that, he was putting together a group of investors to make a bid of between $20 billion and $30 billion—roughly half as much as Bloomberg’s most recent estimate of the worth of the app’s U.S. business.
“What you’re getting is the valuable domestic brand TikTok and 170 million users, with no data … This is the most complex deal ever in social media, and I have to build a new algorithm,” O’Leary told CNBC. “It’s a very interesting deal, and I like it.”
Bobby Kotick
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Bobby Kotick, former CEO of video-game publisher Activision, has expressed interest in buying the app from ByteDance, and has gone so far as to discuss the idea with ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming.
Kotick would almost certainly need coinvestors to raise enough money for a buyout: The Journal reported that Kotick has run the idea by other tech executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Big Tech
Other tech giants including Microsoft, Oracle, and Meta have long been floated as possible candidates to buy out TikTok. They have the money, and some of them are already in the social-media game. Further, they’ve tried it before: Microsoft considered buying TikTok as far back as August 2020, announcing in a blog post that “following a conversation between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and President Donald J. Trump, Microsoft is prepared to continue discussions to explore a purchase of TikTok in the United States.” That deal never materialized, though, after TikTok beat Trump’s sell order in court.
Cloud-computing provider Oracle has a long-standing business relationship with ByteDance, which has generated speculation that it could be a potential suitor. Oracle and Walmart partnered to put together a competing TikTok bid in 2020, which fell apart after Trump’s order was beaten in court. After facing criticisms from the Trump administration and other American officials about its data-security practices, TikTok launched “Project Texas” in 2020, an initiative to keep all of its American user data in separate American data centers rather than routing them through servers in Virginia and Singapore where it could allegedly be accessed by Chinese authorities.
TikTok chose Oracle to help run the computing side of Project Texas, and a UBS report estimated the partnership has netted Oracle around $1.5 billion. As part of the deal, Oracle has reviewed TikTok’s confidential source code, the proprietary and highly valuable recommendation algorithm that powers its For You page.
But UBS quoted an unnamed former FCC commissioner as saying that any sale to a tech company would be next to impossible because of antitrust concerns: “Whoever buys a controlling interest cannot be a tech company; the regulators won’t allow it.”
Nobody
Even if President Biden signs off on the final bill, TikTok has already announced it will pursue legal action to block a sale.
“This is an unprecedented deal worked out between the Republican Speaker and President Biden,” Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s head of public policy for the Americas, said in a memo to TikTok’s U.S. staff. “At the stage that the bill is signed, we will move to the courts for a legal challenge.”
It’s unclear what the legal challenge would look like, but it could focus on the alleged First Amendment restrictions of banning the app. TikTok lobbyists—and hundreds of TikTok users—have been in Washington for weeks, making their case to keep the app running.
“My biggest concern is people’s ability to stay connected to their subcultures,” Los Angeles–based content creator Debbie Galo told Axios. “That’s a big deal.”
