December has been a month of TikTok, with endless waffling over the popular app's future. On Dec. 6th a US federal appeals court upheld a law requiring Chinese-based ByteDance to divest TikTok, which means either sell or face a ban by January 19, 2025. Then recently, on Dec 16, ByteDance filed an emergency request with the Supreme Court an injunction to halt the order, in a last-ditch effort to maintain ownership.
One man who has his eyes set on swooping in to purchase the app is billionaire Frank McCourt. "It's a very popular platform. We don't want to see it shut down or banned. And as I said, president-elect Trump doesn't want to see that either," he explained to Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi. McCourt is looking for a win-win-win with the deal: "the US TikTok is split off from ByteDance; China gets compensated; US citizens no longer have their data scraped."
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This post was written by Rachael Lewis-Krisky, producer for Opening Bid.