Who Owns TikTok
TikTok 🐔🐔
Capitulation Rank: Compromising
Category: Online Platforms & Streaming
Market Cap: Approximately $400 billion
Co-owner Larry Ellison
ByteDance Ltd., a Chinese technology company, is the original owner of TikTok. But the ownership of the video-steaming platform’s U.S. subsidiary changed dramatically in the wake of a 2024 U.S. law that eventually forced TikTok’s Chinese owner to divest its U.S. holdings of the popular social-media site — or face an effective national ban on distribution of its app.
In January 2026, the White House announced that the platform’s new U.S. owners include a coterie of Trump-friendly billionaires and financiers, led by Larry Ellison in his capacity as co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle. Other prominent investors include the Dell Family Office, led by multibillionaire and GOP mega-donor Michael Dell.
Within days of the U.S. takeover, TikTok announced changes to its terms of service and privacy policies, allowing it to collect more sensitive demographic and location data from its users. Some users slammed the new privacy policy as “surveillance” and “beyond invasive and predatory.”
Soon other complaints emerged concerning TikTok’s shadow-banning of content that’s critical of the Trump administration. Many users reported that the app was limiting the reach of certain content, including information about ICE atrocities in Minneapolis and the release of Jeffrey Epstein’s legal files. TikTok, however, claimed that the problem was simply the result of network outages.
Trump had previously stated his preference to see the platform fall under the control of billionaires who were political allies. Now that he’s accomplished that, there needs to be more rigorous monitoring of TikTok to flag any effort to amplify the spread of pro-regime disinformation and propaganda — while blocking dissenting views. Any attempt to manipulate or censor users must be revealed to the approximately 1.6 billion active users who tune into TikTok every month.
- What It Owns:
ByteDance owns a variety of popular digital platforms and apps across different markets. While TikTok is its most notable property, ByteDance also owns Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, tailored specifically for the Chinese market. Other significant properties include social-media network Helo (targeting Indian users), work-management platform Lark/Feishu (similar to Slack), music-streaming service Resso, Chinese news-and-information content aggregator Toutiao, and longer-form streaming platform Xigua Video.
An investors consortium owns the U.S. subsidiary, including cloud-computing giant Oracle, private-equity group Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX — each of which controls 15 percent.