TikTok Sold for $14B | Hacker News Reader

TikTok Sold for $14B

cnbc.com

44 pointsvincent_s47 comments

The title here "TikTok Sold for $14B" is completely incorrect

TikTok was not sold. This is an announcement of an executive order endorsing a proposal to sell TikTok.

> No representatives from ByteDance were present at the signing, and the company hasn’t acknowledged that a transaction is taking place. No purchase price was mentioned, and there’s no indication that the Chinese government has made changes to laws that would be necessary for a deal to take place.

Why does this even need an executive order?

Because the illusion that they used to call "capitalism" is revealing itself for what it really was, i.e. just an illusion.

Socialism (of the authoritarian centralized sort) is state ownership of the means of production.

Fascism is private ownership but state control of the means of production through political and economic pressure, or if that fails by direct edict. The state gets all the benefits of owning the means of production but none of the responsibility, and also gets to pick winners. The winners it picks are generally people aligned with the regime, so over time the business world gets stacked with partisans.

(I'm talking about the economic component of fascism, which usually comes with other ideological components like ultra-reactionary social doctrines and extreme nationalism.)

Capitalism in the free market sense is private ownership and private control, with businesses having a significant amount of independence from the state. This independence is both economic and ideological, e.g. free enterprises openly criticizing or even opposing the political class. Fascism seeks to stamp this out and force business to align with state authority.

The law mandating TikTok's sale requires the president to formally state whether TikTok is in compliance with the law's requirement of at least 80% non-Chinese ownership. The EO is the executive branch's way of making the formal declaration.

Whitehouse post: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/09/fact-sheet-pr...

* TikTok's US operations sold for $14B

As far as I know TikTok in Africa and Eurasia will still be owned, and operated, by ByteDance from China.

How all of this is going to work out content wise is going to be... interesting, indeed.

When the Trump administration came close to forcing a divestment/shutdown on TikTok in 2020, Americans were 10% of TikTok's user base but 50% of revenue.

Of the top 50 most-followed accounts <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...>, 21 of 49 (not including TikTok itself) are American.

According to Bloomberg, TikTok will still get about 50% of the profits from the US operations

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-26/bytedance... (archive: https://archive.ph/4m7Ms)

This headline is completely misleading and incorrect. I don't think it necessarily needs flagging, but could be fine corrected to reflect the actual event.

> President Trump said Chinese President Xi Jinping gave the deal the go ahead. Vance said the Chinese government put up some resistance before the agreement

I find these two paragraphs particularly interesting

In any open auction among US buyers, TikTok would be worth hundreds of billions.

Without the algorithm, TikTok is not TikTok.

When Tiktok was banned in India, everyone tried to recreate it, include Instagram. Everyone failed to get anywhere close to TikTok for you page.

Once the new algorithm is live, expect massive backlash.

Probably for the better, its incredibly damaging to young brains.

Oh yes, I remember reading the am17an report about that! It was incredibly detailed and definitely not just a single-sentence declarative summary of Haidt's "The Anxious Generation."

It is not even like I disagree with the gist. Sadly, my feelings don't decide fact... or so the lesswrong weirdos keep telling me. If it was incredibly damaging, it would be incredibly easy to show. Instead, it's some poorly picked cherries by someone (Haidt) who should know better. Worse still, the best you can get from the data is a "maybe. I mean it is not immediately dis-proven... which is a start."

The kind of person who doesn’t believe this is bad for children, is the same kind of person who would believe Big Tobacco sponsored studies about how cigarettes don’t cause cancer in the 80s. For the data driven like yourself, I remember a Jeff Bezos anecdote, “When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right"

Try spending time with a phone addicted teen and you might have a more sympathetic take.

  > The kind of person...

That's on me, I came in hot and you came back hotter. Apologies.

Let me take the temp down and ask it a different way. You don't feel weird saying there is an epidemic happening to our kids (again, something I’m at least partially convinced of), but we can't really put together a narrative one-tenth as cohesive as what we have for the efficacy of gray-market/off-label Ozempic?

I don't feel weird about it because it's a trillion dollar business, and it's in their best interests to muddy the waters regarding any cohesive argument. But when you just look at these things from first principles, boasting about 1 billion hours of shorts watched in a month or something ridiculous like that, AI generated content on loop, teens/adults getting into status/envy games on these platforms, the "connection" aspect looks like a very small positive.

I don't think your example of off-label Ozempic is isomorphic - the more apt comparison is one I already gave: Why did it take us 30 years to realize cigarettes cause 400k deaths a year? The answer is because there was simply huge amounts of money involved.

They’re licensing the TikTok algorithm, although it may diverge in the future

TrumpTok is gonna be grooooooooooooosssssssssssssssssss. I don't for a second think that they're going to take what is, by their admission, the most sophisticated and far-reaching propaganda engine in human history and carefully balance the conflicting duty of delivering maximum value while not taking advantage of people.

Abu Dhabi royal family to take stake in TikTok US

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45385926

I'd rather have China control TikTok than Abu Dhabi.

Why are these guys invited to capitalism ?

Nice social media app you've got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it. This can be avoided if you sell us a piece of the action cheap.

This feels like an incredibly low valuation for what has been billed as such an important commodity.

It's a forced takeover at (metaphorical, for now) gunpoint, fair valuation has nothing to do with it.

A more apt title would be "US government pretends TikTok was sold"

Is it any less sold than real property seized by a municipality or state?

Sure the sale didn't take place via well trodden and codified procedure but it still happened. At the end of the day might makes right in this kind of thing, as unfortunate as it may be.

Yes, because the owners are in China, away from the reach of the US government.

Incredible that this happened. AIPAC and the ADL targeted Tiktok because it didn't restrict Palestine content while the other social media did. And so the US Congress killed it. Absolutely incredible first amendment work from the Land of the Free.

Honestly I wonder if it's more than that. China has preemptively banned basically all major US social media sites (and many tech companies) to the benefit of their own local brands. Those brands are now entering the US market, and so I could see why the US might want to try and block them, although I suppose I wish social media sites were just allowed to operate in each respective country.

"In recent weeks, powerful politicians, including senators Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio and House Representative Mike Gallagher, have reiterated calls for a ban on TikTok, citing the app’s alleged bias towards anti-Israel and anti-Jewish content."

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/10/tiktok-faces-renew...

There is no universe in which TikTok is only worth $14B.

Indeed, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19B in 2014.

TikTok have a much more valuable audience than WhatsApp had, and we've had significant inflation since.

Nice website you have there, shame if something happened to it

This is a reward to Oracle for their support of trump, with the condition that TikTok now support him too.

How about the universe where the us government threatens to shut it down unless you sell it to its cronies?

I believe it was TikTok’s U.S. operations that were sold for $14B, The rest of the world is still under Chinese ownership... hmm, did I just say ‘the rest of the world is still under Chinese ownership’?

There is when the $14B doesn't go to Bytedance.

First of all it's just TikTok's US operations. Secondly, those US operations have the price significantly depressed by risk that TikTok gets shut down without a deal.

So the "TikTok ban" effectively gave TikTok's US operations to US oligarchs for a steal.

I don't think it's a good idea for the US government to dictate (or attempt to dictate) specific deals and specific terms for those deals.

I think, in the context of something like a financial crisis, there could be a "this is the least bad thing at this point" argument to be made. But for tiktok today, this has to be among the worst things.

It looks like this massively undervalues TikTok's US operations, meaning the current administration is essentially gifting tens of billions to a friendly oligarch.

What a time of corruption we live in.

>I don't think it's a good idea for the US government to dictate (or attempt to dictate) specific deals and specific terms for those deals.

The US government is mandating the transaction happening in the first place, so of course there is going to be government input into the terms. Look at the forced sale of Bayer's US division during WW1. Or, the government requiring very specific actions by GM in return for the 2009 bailout.

>It looks like this massively undervalues TikTok's US operations

Valuation is an art, not a science.

It's a sale required by law, so it's not surprising that the terms are lower than what may be achievable through a public auction. Also, the details of the transaction matter; much of TikTok's value is in the algorithm, and how and whether that is transferred is unclear. But I'm not going to complain about American buyers paying less than they might otherwise.

>meaning the current administration is essentially gifting tens of billions to a friendly oligarch.

"Oligarch" = rich guy you don't like

You should look up the definition of oligarch, think about it a bit, and see if you can't relate it to the power structures at play here.

Actual title is: "Trump approves TikTok deal through executive order, Vance says business valued at $14 billion"

Title is: Trump approves TikTok deal through executive order, Vance says business valued at $14 billion

TikTok has not been sold for $14B but Trump signed an executive order to transfer TikTok to US owners... for less than 1x it's US revenue.

It reminds me of the oligarchs in Russia, license raj in India, privatization in Mexico etc…

being close to political power lets folks buy up crown-jewel assets at a fraction of their true value.

More accurately: Trump signs executive order forcing ByteDance to sell controlling interest in US TikTok for less than 10% of its actual value to right-wing billionaires

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