Background: TikTok is the social media app that took the world by algorithmic storm. It became the fastest platform to hit 1 billion monthly active users, and in 2025 the average user spent more than 600 hours a year scrolling. But the elephant in the room has always been ownership. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese tech giant that’s been under intense scrutiny in the US over fears American user data could be accessed by China.

What happened: After years of pressure and a brief one-day shutdown, ByteDance has officially finalised the sale of TikTok’s US business. A group of American investors, including Oracle and private equity firm Silver Lake are taking control. ByteDance will retain just under a 20% stake, while US user data will now be hosted entirely on Oracle’s American cloud infrastructure.

What else: The reported valuation for TikTok US sits at around $14 billion USD. Given TikTok’s scale and revenue in the US, many analysts see this as a heavily discounted deal.

What's the key learning?

💡Valuing part of a platform is far harder than valuing the whole thing. Once TikTok’s US arm is split out from the global business, especially without full control of the algorithm, traditional valuation metrics become pretty messy, pretty fast.

💡On the numbers alone, TikTok US looks wildly undervalued. It has more than 200 million US users and generates over $10 billion USD in annual US revenue. Meta trades at 10 times its sales and Alphabet trades at around 8 times its sales, implying TikTok US could be worth $40 – $100 billion, not the reported $14 billion.

💡When governments step in, deals stop being about maximising value and start being about staying alive. For ByteDance, this sale looks less like a great exit and more like the price of keeping TikTok operating in the US.