Musk, Mrbeast, Larry Ellison: Who could buy Tiktok?

Jimmy Donaldson – also known as Mrbeast – He was jubilant by telling his dozens of millions of Tiktok followers about his offer to buy the platform.

“I could become your new CEO! I’m super excited!” Donaldson said from a private jet. Then he proceeded to pay $ 10,000 to random new followers.

The publication of the Internet creator has been seen more than 73 million times since Monday. Donaldson said he could not share details about his offer, but promised: “You just have to know that it will be madness.”

Donaldson is one of the multiple suitors who have expressed interest in buying Tiktok, the popular social media platform that has become the subject of a political drama that advances rapidly in the United States.

Last year, then President Joe Biden signed a law that gave Bytedance, the Matrix of Tiktok based in China, until January 19 to sell the platform or face a prohibition in the United States.

The legislation addressed concerns about Tiktok’s links with the Chinese government and concerns that the application is a risk to national security.

President Donald Trump has raised the possibility of a joint business.

“I would like the United States to have a 50%property position,” he said in a social truth publication on Sunday. “When doing this, we save Tiktok, we keep it in good hands and allow him (stay active).”

Since then, Trump signed an executive order that allows the application to remain operational for another 75 days.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that China was considering selling Tiktok to Elon MuskThe richest man in the world and nearby ally of President Trump, who already owns the social media platform X.

The musk itself wrote In X this week that although it has long been against the prohibition of Tiktok, “the current situation in which Tiktok is allowed to operate in the United States, but X is not allowed to operate in China is unbalanced. Something needs to change. “

At a press conference on Tuesday, a journalist asked Trump if he would be willing to buy the platform.

“It would be if I wanted to buy it, yes,” the president replied.

“I would like Larry to buy it too,” Trump added, referring to the president of Oracle. Larry EllisonA Trump supporter for a long time that he was on stage with him for a separate ad.

Oracle is one of the main suppliers of Tiktok servers, manager Many of the data centers where billions of videos of the platform are stored.

Last year, Oracle warned that a Tiktok prohibition could harm his business. The cloud computing giant was also one of the main contestants to buy the social media platform in 2020, when Trump tried to ban it.

Multimillionaire investor Frank McCourt He has also expressed interest in Tiktok and has been conducting interviews with the media about the perspective for several months.

McCourt has said that he wants Tiktok to work with technology supervised by the Project Liberty Institute, which he founded. He has criticized the data collection practices of social media companies.

Project Liberty is bidding for Tiktok without his owner algorithm. McCourt said CNBC this week that Project Liberty “is not interested in Chinese algorithm or technology, even when he acknowledged that the” is worth less “platform without him.

Ultimately, President Trump is likely to play an important role in the selection of a Tiktok American buyer.

“It will be a winner who will probably sympathize politically with President Donald Trump,” said Professor Anupam Chander, of the Georgetown Law Faculty.

Professor Chander said that the 50-50 joint property model does not conform to the requirements of the law, which could lead Trump to press Congress to review the law.

For now, the future of the platform remains in Limbo.

Professor Chander said that the Biden administration made a “unpaired error” by allowing the law to give the President a huge control over who is the owner of Tiktok.

“It was a terrible idea to put the future of a massive information platform in this political maelstrom,” said Professor Chander.