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.

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’?

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

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

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

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.