Last week, the US House of Representatives voted by a margin of 352-65 to ban or force the sale of the popular social media app TikTok by its Beijing-based owner ByteDance. President Joe Biden had provided the greenlight to policymakers during this State of the Union speech earlier this month. He declared that he would sign the ban if it was ultimately approved by Congress. The bill must now pass through the Democratic-controlled Senate before heading to President Biden’s desk.
Steven Mnuchin, the former Treasury Secretary for the Donald Trump White House, recently expressed interest in buying TikTok. Last Thursday, Mnuchin said in an interview with CNBC that he had spoken with “a bunch of people” about creating an investor group that could make a serious push to buy the app.
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, reportedly generated $120 billion in worldwide revenues in 2023. That was up 40% compared to the previous year. Meanwhile, TikTok had posted revenues of $20 billion. That means that ByteDance is running close to Meta Platforms as the world’s largest social media company by worldwide sales.
Most of ByteDance’s revenues still come from its operations in mainland China, where it operates TikTok sister platform Douyin. It has also had strong success by tapping into the livestream e-commerce trend that is popular across Asia. TikTok has yet to turn a profit, while Douyin delivered $28 billion in net profits in the previous year.
