Tom Gerken, Liv McMahon & Imran Rahman-Jones
Technology reporters
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US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order granting TikTok a 75-day extension to comply with a law banning the app if it is not sold.
The social media platform briefly went dark in the US days before Trump took office, after the Supreme Court denied a bid by its Chinese owner ByteDance to overturn the legislation.
TikTok came back online with a short message thanking Trump for his “efforts”.
Has Trump overturned the TikTok ban?
An executive order is an instruction from the president which has the weight of the law behind it.
But Trump’s order does not overturn the ban.
Instead it tells the US attorney general not to enforce the law for now – something experts had expected would be his first move.
That buys time for his administration to, as the order puts it, “determine the appropriate course of action.”
Trump has floated the possibility of TikTok becoming a joint venture, telling reporters he was seeking a 50-50 partnership between “the United States” and ByteDance, though he did not give any further details on how that might work.
For now though the order creates a situation where the president is directly opposing a ruling made by the Supreme Court, which upheld the law to ban TikTok on 17 January.
It said the ban was “designed to prevent China – a designated foreign adversary – from leveraging its control over ByteDance to capture the personal data of US TikTok users”.
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Technically, even after the 75 days have passed, it would be possible for Trump to allow the law to stand but tell the Department of Justice (DoJ) to continue to ignore it.
The government would be effectively telling Apple and Google they will not be punished for continuing to allow people to download TikTok onto their devices, meaning the law would remain in place but would essentially be redundant.
It is not clear whether the firms would continue to offer the app under these circumstances.
Could Elon Musk, MrBeast or Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary buy TikTok?
ByteDance has long insisted that its prize asset is not for sale, however could that change with a new president?
When Trump signed the executive order, he said “every rich person has called me” to signal their interest in TikTok.
Trump appears to want to find a compromise that complies with the spirit rather than the letter of law, floating the idea of TikTok being jointly owned.
“What I’m thinking of saying to someone is buy it and give half to the US, half, and we’ll give you a permit,” he said during a press conference about artificial intelligence.
He said he’d met the “big owners” of TikTok, adding it was “worthless” if it didn’t get a permit of the type he had in mind – but would be worth “a trillion dollars” if he allowed it to operate in the US.
And he also said he would be open to selling the app to Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, as well as Elon Musk.
“I would be, if he wanted to buy it,” he said.
Previous names linked with buying TikTok include billionaire Frank McCourt and the Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary – a celebrity investor on Shark Tank, the US version of Dragon’s Den.
The biggest YouTuber in the world Jimmy Donaldson – AKA MrBeast – has also claimed he is in the running after a number of investors contacted him following an earlier tweet signalling his interest.
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MrBeast is the most popular YouTuber in the world with more than 300m subscribers
A US search engine called Perplexity AI has also reportedly offered to merge with TikTok.
In March 2024, Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he wanted to put together a group to buy the app but it is not clear if he is still pursuing this.
What about TikTok’s sister apps Lemon8 and CapCut?
Watch: Can young Americans live without TikTok?
TikTok was the only ByteDance app which came back immediately – though only for people who already had the app.
It is still not available to download from Apple and Google’s app stores.
Two other apps which remain inaccessible are Lemon8, another social media app which has been compared to Pinterest, and CapCut, a video editing app.
Meanwhile Marvel Snap, a digital card game published by a ByteDance subsidiary, is now available once again after it too went down – which caught even its US-based developer Second Dinner off guard.
What other platforms could TikTok users use instead?
TikTok says it has 170 million US users who spent – on average – 51 minutes per day on the app in 2024.
Experts say rivals such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts could benefit if Trump’s efforts to fully restore TikTok don’t succeed.
Users bring advertisers – so this could be a big financial boost to those platforms.
“Chief marketing officers who we’ve spoken with confirmed that they will divert their media dollars to Meta and Google if they can no longer advertise on TikTok,” said Kelsey Chickering, an analyst at market research company Forrester.
Other potential winners include Twitch, which made its name by hosting livestreams – a popular feature on TikTok. Twitch is well known particularly to gamers, though its other content is expanding too.
Other Chinese-owned platforms, such as Xiaohongshu – known as RedNote among its US users – have also seen rapid growth in the US and the UK.
