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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

So if TikTok is forced to be sold to American conglomerate, which company is likely to take over?

Google? Great, an even larger company gets free data

Microsoft? Yuck. Pass.

Apple? Probably not a good idea to lock it behind the Apple Wall. It might have worked for Instagram in 2009-2010, but the ecosystem has lost its desire.

Twitter? Doubt this company has enough capital left to absorb the ecosystem of TT. Not even sure if there’s engineering talent left to absorb it, let alone perform the transition.

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Last time this happened it was either Walmart or Oracle

Two different issues. None of those will be great for privacy, but they’d likely be better for national security than funneling all that data straight to the CCP.

Congress sadly DNGAF about our privacy rights, but they are rightfully concerned about espionage and psyops.

This is correct. People like to conflate the privacy concerns about American social media with the national security concerns about TikTok, but they really are different things. Yes, privacy will still be a problem, but a) no more than it is with any other social media platform, and b) at least the incentives will be transparent. Publicly traded companies want to generate a return for their investors, which they do by focusing on growth and profit, to varying degrees. So it's pretty easy to understand that everything they do is going to ultimately be to the benefit of their bottom line. And their leadership, shareholders, and operations are subject to American laws.

With a Chinese-owned company, their incentives are to do what's best for the CCP. In the short term, maybe that's making some money and allowing American Zoomers to work themselves into a frenzy over Gaza, but it may also be interfering in our elections, undermining support for NATO and Taiwan, pushing pro-CCP narratives, etc.

Why would it be to a conglomerate? It’s more likely that existing US investors raise extra money to just buy it and run it locally. Existing antitrust environment would make it extremely unlikely an existing consumer tech co will be allowed to buy it and non-consumer wouldn’t make sense.

No reason, other than the price (likely around $100B, more than twice the price Elon paid for Twitter, or roughly the market cap of Starbucks)

Far less if the personalization and recommendation system isn’t included.

Twitter was taken private at like $44B.

I've seen estimates that TikTok would be valued at $250B.

Bytedance (parent company) had $120B revenue in 2023.

Presumably the company would split? Otherwise much of that revenue goes away when TikTok is blocked in China.

Do you remember when the government gave a large bribe to Microsoft for taking over Skype? this kind of shit is nothing new.

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