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Ryuu96 on 14 March 2024
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Shtinamin_ said:
Ryuu96 said:

Because they (aside from Temu) are American companies and this bill is about China, why I called it a "ban" is because technically it's not a ban, they want ByteDance to divest, but the odds of them divesting are slim to none so in effect it is a ban, but if we entertain TikTok selling to someone, who would it be? An American company.

I agree that they are also doing this due to China speculations, but what happens if a social media is accused of "election interference".

If we entertain ByteDance selling TikTok, I presume that the US would want a US company to own it as well. (Which seems like a social media monopoly, but that can be discussed later).

Would another social media company buy it? Or would any US company be able to buy it?
Doing a very surface-level dive: There are websites that value TikTok in 2023 at around $80B, though I have also seen ~$180B. Elon Musk spent around ~20% of his net worth to buy Twitter. I dont have many other sources of huge social media companies being bought by another, so I assume that a US company won't spend more than 20-25% of their net worth for TikTok (but we can see a higher percentage if they believe they can gain profit?). I'll be using the $80B estimation for simplicity. Here are some US companies that could make the purchase.

Company, Market Cap, % of market cap to buy TikTok

Walmart $493.7B 16%
Amazon $1.82T 4%
Microsoft $3.09T 2.5%
Apple $2.77T 2.8%
Alphabet $1.72T 4.6%
Meta $1.28T 6.3%
Disney $206.36B 38%
Netflix $265.28B 30%

There aren't too many companies that have more than $200B as a market cap that are US owned.

Capitalism will win in that hypothetical event, United States definitely won't be banning any of their own companies, Lol.

I assume the United States would want a US company or individual to acquire TikTok USA, I also think there's not many out there with the financial ability to do so and most exist in America. I've read that TikTok would be around $100-$200bn in total, I think what you've read may have been that TikTok is valued at around $80bn but acquisitions always come with a premium % on the value of the business, so if TikTok is valued at $80bn (hypothetical) but add on a (random) 40% premium then TikTok would sell for $112bn but I reckon the premium would be higher than 40%.

Microsoft for example has $80bn in pure cash, Alphabet has around $110bn in pure cash, etc. That's still quite a bit off the mark, so even IF ByteDance sells (almost certainly not going to happen) any of the big companies would have to do a combination of their own cash, stocks and maybe large borrowing as well, or it would need to be a joint venture. Horrifyingly, Bobby Kotick is looking into "acquiring" TikTok and trying to get Sam Altman onboard but he'd definitely need other investors and companies to join his venture.

You're probably going to need multiple companies taking a large split.

Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 14 March 2024