Buyers circle and rumours swirl as TikTok sale deadline looms

The list of would-be buyers for TikTok in the US – both rumoured and confirmed – has grown longer as the deadline for deciding its future looms.

The social media giant faces being shut down in the US unless it sells to an American company by 5 April.

The runners and riders range from US tech giants to the British entrepreneur dubbed “the king of homemade porn”.

However, TikTok and its Chinese owner, ByteDance have still not confirmed they are willing to do a deal.

They also continue to reject the reason for the sale – that the US considers their ties to the Chinese government a national security threat.

It is also not clear what exactly would be sold, in particular what would happen to TikTok’s algorithim, which decides what content to expose users to, and is considered a big reason for its success.

“TikTok without its algorithm is like Harry Potter without his wand – it’s simply not as powerful,” said Kelsey Chickering, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Despite all this uncertainty, Ms Chickering said it was unlikely the app would go offline in the US as it briefly did in January.

“It is highly unlikely that TikTok will go dark again. All signs point to a deal or another extension.”

As with everything else to do with the app’s future, who exactly is attempting to buy it is cloaked in uncertainty.

According to the New York Times, Amazon recently sent a letter to the US Vice President JD Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick expressing interest.

Amazon declined to comment when approached by BBC News.

Another late-stage bid reportedly came from an app marketing and analytics company called AppLovin.

They have remained similarly tight-lipped on the speculation, though – at least in public.

A third last-minute bidder includes the man once called “the king of homemade porn” by the Sunday Times – British OnlyFans founder Tim Stokely.

His proposed bid – and all the media attention which comes with it – happens to coincide with the relaunch of a company he co-founded in 2022.

One confirmed bidder is Perplexity, an AI search startup which counts Amazon’s Jeff Bezos among its backers.

The company recently published its “vision” for what its version of TikTok would look like for America.

Another potential investor is Frank McCourt, who founded the Project Liberty organisation in 2021, which aims to give more power to internet users.

He says he would scrap the current algorithm in favour of a far more open version where users have more control over what they see on the platform.

Also part of this bid are Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary.

According to the Financial Times, a consortium of American businesses is close to getting US government endorsement for a bid – though of course it is up to ByteDance, not the White House, whether they sell or not.

The group includes Trump loyalist Marc Andreessen and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.

Oracle already handles the data for TikTok in the US.There are a number of other potential bids which have been mentioned by Donald Trump when he has been asked.

He has said, in responses to questions from reporters, that Elon Musk may be interested in getting hold of TikTok, and has also mentioned Microsoft in the past.

Microsoft had a bid rejected in 2020 when the previous Tump administration explored a TikTok ban which never happened.

YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, or MrBeast to his millions of fans, has also said he’s been contacted by a number of different groups trying to get him to be the face of a new bid.

But whoever ends up being picked by the White House to go forward with a bid will still have to get over the same huge hurdle: how do you buy a company that’s not for sale?