Meet the billionaires competing to buy TikTok – from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to ByteDance stakeholder Jeff Yass

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. US?

Under the new legislation, Chinese parent company ByteDance has a year to sell its stake in the app so it can continue to operate in the US.

It is important to note that China’s Ministry of Commerce would have to approve ByteDance’s divestiture from TikTok, and the Chinese government has indicated it strongly opposes the sale.

In the event that a sale is approved, it appears Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame will undertake an Elon Musk-style purchase of TikTok.

According to CNBC, O’Leary is reportedly gathering a group of investors to buy the app. His opening bid would be between $20 billion and $30 billionwhich is a 90% reduction from the company’s 2023 valuation of $220 billion.

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 heads the company behind the Call of Duty franchise, reportedly wants to team up with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to buy TikTok if it is sold

The reason O’Leary said he will only raise a fraction of the app’s current value is because he and others believe the Chinese government and/or ByteDance will be unwilling to sell the rabidly successful algorithms that have made TikTok a of the most successful algorithms. popular social media platforms in the world.

That means anyone who buys the app, including Mr. Wonderful, will have to develop new algorithms that are not guaranteed to be equally good.

And O’Leary may not even have the resources to buy TikTok, the New York Post reported.

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick — who helped lead 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 to create a new algorithm for it.

Kotick brought the idea of ​​buying TikTok to numerous people at a Wall Street Journal dinner in March reportedincluding Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

Steve Mnuchin (pictured) is in a unique position 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 off on TikTok’s possible ban from the US.

Former President Trump (pictured April 25 before the hush money trial started) has sidestepped the TikTok ban, once supported it as commander in chief, but now slams Biden for being ‘responsible for banning TikTok’

Jeffrey Yass, founder of Susquehanna International Group, is a sleeper to buy TikTok

Past Altman’s net worth of $2 billionmakes him an attractive partner in the bid to take over TikTok, as he could give the eventual US version of the app an edge in training its AI models.

Steve Mnuchin, former President Trump’s Treasury Secretary, 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 entering politics, is building an investor base to buy TikTok through his fund Liberty Strategic Capital.

Mnuchin is in the unique position of having played a key role years ago in the Trump administration’s efforts to ban TikTok, which now aims to corner the market of endless, mindless scrolling.

A sleeper to buy TikTok would have to be billionaire Susquehanna founder Jeffrey Yass, who already owns 15% of ByteDance and reportedly has plenty of cash.

The headquarters of ByteDance, the parent company of video sharing app TikTok, are seen in Beijing on September 16, 2020

TikTok’s offices are in The Sorting Office in Dublin’s Docklands

Google, which likely has the resources and incentive to buy out TikTok and eliminate them as a competitor, is precisely that incentive that makes it less likely that the search engine company will be a serious competitor, experts say.

Meta is embroiled in an FTC antitrust lawsuit over its alleged illegal purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp, making CEO Mark Zuckerberg another unlikely contender to buy out TikTok

Moreover, Susquehanna’s big advantage is that it may have access to an early version of TikTok’s valuable algorithm, the New York Post reported.

Right now, there appears to be a budding four-way war between the super-rich to acquire TikTok, but there are other players who are unlikely to participate in a potential sale.

A former Justice Department official told CNN that the Biden administration’s tough stance on monopolies could deter companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Meta from stepping in to acquire one of their biggest competitors : if only to avoid the headache of government lawsuits.

‘If you were to say: an Intel, or a Cisco, maybe Oracle, then I don’t know. “If you told me it was Verizon or AT&T, it might not be that big of a deal,” the official said.

Still, a sale is far from certain as TikTok will file a lawsuit against the law that threatens its existence in the US, a company spokesperson told DailyMail.com.

TikTok CEO Shou Chew also confirmed that the company will be filing suit in a video he posted to the social media platform, confidently claiming, “Rest assured, we’re not going anywhere.”