Meet the billionaires competing to buy TikTok - from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to ... trends now
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
Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, who helms the company behind the Call of Duty franchise, reportedly wants to partner with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to buy TikTok if it is sold
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
