If Bobby Kotick or any other tech bigwig wants to buy TikTok’s U.S. business, it’s going to cost them a record-setting $300 billion, according to one analyst.
Dan Ives, Wedbush Securities’ managing director, shared the eye-popping estimated price tag with TheWrap on Thursday.
Ives’ prediction comes after The Information reported Kotick, the former Activision Blizzard CEO, “remains interested” in taking over TikTok’s American business, although he is expected to wait for president-elect Donald Trump to take office before making an offer. TikTok, according to a court filing earlier this week, said it has 170 million monthly users in the U.S.
A $300 billion deal would easily make it the biggest acquisition in history. Vodafone set the record when it bought German conglomerate Mannesmann for $181 billion in 2000. That same year, AOL set the record for most expensive deal in U.S. history when it bought Time Warner for $165 billion.
The rush to sort out TikTok’s future in the U.S. is accelerating, as the wildly popular app is set to be banned from the States on January 19, 2025 — one day before Trump is inaugurated — unless its Chinese owners divest its American operations by then.
The TikTok ban was initially floated during Trump’s first administration, before ultimately being passed by Congress and signed into law earlier this year by President Joe Biden.
Chief among the concerns U.S. lawmakers have with TikTok is that it doubles as a spyware app for the Chinese government. Beijing-based Bytedance, TikTok’s parent company, is required to share user data with China’s communist government if compelled to do so, according to Chinese law.
Most Americans don’t seem to be too concerned with China’s government having easy access to their data, though. Only 32% of Americans are in favor of the U.S. government banning TikTok, according to a Pew Research Center survey in September of 10,678 respondents aged 18 and older. That’s down from 50% who supported a ban in March 2023 — and TikTok’s users are even less inclined to support a ban, with 61% of U.S. users opposing it. (Among those surveyed, 51% leaned towards Democrats politically, while 46% said they were Republican-leaning.)
On Monday, TikTok and Bytedance filed an emergency injunction calling for an appeals court to temporarily block the ban.
The delay, TikTok argued in its filing, would “create breathing room” for the U.S. Supreme Court to “conduct an orderly review” of the law, as well as give the incoming Trump administration time to evaluate the matter. TikTok pointed to president-elect Donald Trump’s comment earlier this year that he was going to “save TikTok” in its filing. The app has 170 million monthly users in the U.S., according to its filing in U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit.
TikTok asked for the court to make its decision by December 16.
In the meantime, TikTok has started offering its users up to $400 to recruit their friends to join the app for the first time.
