How a Sale of TikTok Would Work and Who Might Buy It

There's a new parlor game on Wall Street: guessing TikTok’s next owner.

President Trump signed an executive order in January that delayed enforcement of a law that banned the popular video app. Under the order, the app must now be sold to a non-Chinese owner by early April.

Since he signed the order, Mr. Trump has dropped a flurry of sometimes conflicting hints about how the next several weeks could play out: He has suggested he wants a bidding war; he has said the United States should own part of the app; he has named Microsoft and Elon Musk as potential buyers, even as others have raised their hands.

But the mechanics of a potential sale are still murky.

ByteDance, TikTok’s owner, has said for years that it cannot sell the app, in part because the Chinese government would not allow the export of its all-important algorithm.

And it’s not clear TikTok’s American investors are interested in a sale, either.

“There are a number of alternatives we can talk to President Trump and his team about that are short of selling the company that allow the company to continue to operate, maybe with a change of control of some kind, but short of having to sell,” Bill Ford, chief executive of General Atlantic, told CNBC. General Atlantic, a private equity firm, is an investor in ByteDance.

Here is what we know about what happens next:

Who wants to buy TikTok?

Mr. Trump has floated a number of names in public recently, including Mr. Musk, Microsoft and Oracle. In 2020, Microsoft, Oracle and Walmart tried to buy TikTok before those talks fell apart.

Other potential bidders include Jesse Tinsley, the founder of the payroll firm Employer.com, who has put together a consortium that includes the chief executive of Roblox, the video game platform.