Meet the billionaires in the running to buy TikTok
- Activision CEO Bobby Kotick and ChatGPT-maker Sam Altman could team up
- Kevin O’Leary and Trump cabinet official Mnuchin also want to buy TikTok
- Don’t expect Google or Meta, besieged with antitrust lawsuits, to join the fray
After months of heated debate over the app’s safety, President Joe Biden has signed a bill banning TikTok in an effort to force a sale – but who are the mega-wealthy suitors who want to buy the addictive app boasting a coveted 170 million users in the US?
Under the new legislation, Chinese parent company ByteDance has a year to sell its stake in the app in order for it to continue operating in the US.
It’s important to note that China’s Commerce Ministry would have to approve ByteDance’s divestiture from TikTok, and the Chinese government has indicated its strong opposition to the sale.
In the event a sale is approved, it appears Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame may be mounting an Elon Musk-style purchase of TikTok.
O’Leary is reportedly assembling a group of investors to buy the app, according to CNBC. His opening bid would be $20 billion to $30 billion, which is a 90% cut from that company’s 2023 valuation of $220 billion.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew has said the bill would ban the app, indicating that ByteDance has no intentions to divest from the popular video-sharing platform
O’Leary’s (pictured) bid to buy TikTok is in question after the New York Post reported he may not have sufficient resources
The reason O’Leary said he will only put up a fraction of the app’s current worth is because he and others think the Chinese government and/or ByteDance won’t be willing to sell the rabidly successful algorithms that have made TikTok one of the most popular social media platforms in the world.
That means anyone who buys the app, including Mr. Wonderful, will have to engineer new algorithms that aren’t guaranteed to be as good.
And O’Leary may not even have the resources to buy TikTok, the New York Post reported.
However, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick – who helped broker the $69 billion sale of his company to Microsoft last year – may have the resources to buy the Chinese app and the technological know how in order to create a new algorithm for it.
Kotick floated the idea of buying TikTok in March to numerous people at a dinner, the Wall Street Journal reported, with one of them being OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Steve Mnuchin (pictured) is uniquely positioned as an anti-TikTok government official during the Trump years who now wants to buy the app and make it his own
Although efforts to ban TikTok began under former President Trump, President Joe Biden is the one who ultimately signed TikTok’s potential banishment from the US
Former President Trump (pictured April 25 before hush money trial kicked off for the day) has flip-flopped on the TikTok ban, once supporting it as commander-in-chief but now railing against Biden for being ‘responsible for banning TikTok’
Jeffrey Yass, founder of Susquehanna International Group, is a sleeper pick to buy TikTok
Beyond Altman’s $2 billion net worth, he is an attractive partner in the bid to acquire TikTok because he could give the eventual US version of the app a head start in training its AI models.
Former President Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin surprised many when he also joined the growing fray of interested buyers last month.
Mnuchin, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs for 17 years before his pivot to politics, is in the throes of building up an investor group to buy TikTok through his fund Liberty Strategic Capital.
Mnuchin is in the unique position of having been a key player in the Trump Administration’s effort to ban TikTok years ago, who now wants to corner the market of endless, mindless scrolling.
A sleeper pick to buy TikTok has to include billionaire Susquehanna founder Jeffrey Yass, who already owns 15% of ByteDance and is reportedly flush with cash.
The headquarters of ByteDance, the parent company of video sharing app TikTok, is seen in Beijing on September 16, 2020
TikTok’s offices at The Sorting Office at the Docklands in Dublin
Google, which likely has the resources and incentive to buy out TikTok to eliminate them as a competitor, its that very incentive that makes it less likely the search engine company will be a serious contender, experts say
Meta is embroiled in an antitrust lawsuit from the FTC over its supposed illegal purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp, making CEO Mark Zuckerberg another unlikely contender to buy out TikTok
Plus, Susquehanna’s huge advantage is that it may have access to an early version of the precious TikTok algorithm, the New York Post reported.
As of now, there appears to be a budding four-way war among the super rich to acquire TikTok, but there are other players who aren’t likely to participate in a possible sale.
A former Justice Department official told CNN that the Biden Administration’s harsh stance on monopolies could preclude companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Meta from stepping in to buy one of their biggest competitors: if just to avoid the headache of government lawsuits.
‘If you were to say, like, an Intel, or a Cisco, maybe Oracle, I don’t know. If you were to tell me it’s Verizon, or AT&T, maybe it’s not as big of a problem,’ the official said.
Still, a sale is far from a certainty, given that TikTok will issue a court challenge to the law threatening its existence in the US, a company spokesperson told DailyMail.com.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew also confirmed that the company will be suing in a video he posted on the social media platform, confidently claiming ‘Rest assured, we aren’t going anywhere.’
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