A forced sale of TikTok within 180 days, as House-passed legislation requires, would be one of the thorniest and most complicated transactions in corporate history, posing financial, technical and geopolitical challenges that experts said could render a sale impractical and increase the likelihood the app will be banned nationwide. A sale would require severing a company worth potentially $150 billion from its technical backbone while being the subject of legal challenges and resistance from China.
Source: House TikTok bill gives ByteDance 6 months to sell. That’s unlikely.
As a TikTok forced sale bill rides bipartisan support into a House vote, a possible bidder has emerged in former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick. Word of Kotick’s rumored interest in scooping up TikTok’s stateside operation entered the media spotlight in a Wall Street Journal report. But at the time of this writing, neither the exec nor ByteDance seemed to have commented publicly on the matter.
Disney CEO Bob Iger acknowledged the company is behind Netflix in terms of technical capabilities — and that it’s in the process of catching up. “When we launched Disney+ in 2019, our goal was to have basically robust video experiences at scale,” Iger said. “What we didn’t have was the technology that we needed to basically lower customer acquisition and retention cost, to essentially grow our margins by reducing marketing expenses.”