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Welcome to what we sincerely hope is our final major update on the "TikTok Sell-off" before the ball drops on 2026. For nearly two years, the fate of the world’s most culturally dominant app has hung in limbo with the collective anxiety of 170 million American users.
Remember when we thought this would all be wrapped up by last Christmas? Oh, you sweet summer children. Let’s walk through the timeline of the wildest corporate decoupling in history, and how we ended up here, in late 2025, still talking about it.
In July 2020, rumors grew that the United States might ban TikTok due to Washington's concerns that the Chinese government could control an app widely used by Americans. Meanwhile, TikTok positions itself to be sold back to an American company.
They appointed an American CEO (former chairman of Disney), ensuring that TikTok's data centers are not in China and that its American operations are separated from its parent company.
This kicked of a chain of executive orders and bans, starting with the first one signed in August 2020. President Trump signs an executive order banning TikTok unless it is sold to an American company within 45 days. Oracle and other investors are seeking to submit a bid to buy TikTok’s US operations.
This first ban is stalled by an injunction from ByteDance and ultimately dropped under the Biden administration in June 2021.
One year later, in December 2022, a Forbes report was released, stating “An internal investigation by ByteDance, the parent company of video-sharing platform TikTok, found that employees tracked multiple journalists covering the company, improperly gaining access to their IP addresses and user data in an attempt to identify whether they had been in the same locales as ByteDance employees.” Leading to TikTok being banned from all mobile devices of lawmakers and all federal government employees, with some exceptions for research and law enforcement purposes.
This soon develops into a new movement to restrict and potentially ban technologies coming from China (including TikTok). Somewhat a first draft of the"Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act”.
On April 24, 2024, President Biden signed the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act."
It was a mouthful of a name for a simple premise: ByteDance (TikTok’s Chinese parent company) had to sell the US slice of the TikTok pie, or face a total ban from American app stores.
They had nine months (until January 2025) to find a buyer, with a built-in option for the President to grant a three-month extension if it looked like a deal was actually happening.
Meanwhile, TikTok CEO Shou Chew released a statement on TikTok declaring that the company will fight the ban because it's unconstitutional.
Content creators and everyday users had mixed reactions. We saw denial ("They’ll never actually do it"), anger (protests outside the Capitol), and bargaining (thousands of "Follow me on Instagram Reels just in case!" videos).
The "TikTok Refugee" content was born.
ByteDance didn't take this lying down. They almost immediately began filing a petition in federal court to overturn the attempted ban.
Their argument was simple: This bill violated the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans, and the suggested divestment was "impossible" with the January 2025 deadline.
The initial panic subsided, and influencers returned to what they can actually do instead of waiting; they created content.
As the 2024 Presidential election heated up, both candidates realized something awkward: The app they just voted to vaporize was also the only place to reach voters under 30.
Suddenly, campaign HQs started to run accounts on the very platform they sought to shut down. The rhetoric against TikTok softened slightly in public, even as the January 2025 deadline crept closer. Neither candidate was fully committed to banning TikTok as of August 2024.
January 2025 arrived. There was no buyer.
Who has $100 billion lying around for an app without its secret sauce algorithm (which China refused to export)? Nobody.
TikTok users started considering alternatives for a potential "mass migration' if TikTok were to be banned. On January 13, 2025, many U.S. users began downloading and switching to Xiaohongshu (also known as RedNote), a Chinese app similar to Instagram and TikTok, as a form of protest. The app quickly became the top download on the Apple App Store, attracting millions of U.S. users.
On January 18, 2025, TikTok temporarily shut down in the United States after ByteDance refused to divest before the PAFACA deadline. Similar apps with connections to ByteDance followed, including Marvel Snap, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, CapCut, Lemon8, and Tokopedia.
Two days later, on the first day of Trump's second presidency, he signed an executive order that gave ByteDance another 75 days to facilitate a divestiture.
The new deadline: April 2025.
On April 4, just one day before the deadline, President Trump signed another executive order delaying the TikTok ban for an additional 75 days.
He had nearly finalized a deal that would have ByteDance hold a minority stake in a new U.S.-based company owned by American investors, but China withdrew its support for the agreement because Trump imposed tariffs against them.
On June 19, Trump signed a third executive order to delay the ban 90 days, instead of the usual 75.
14 September 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US and China have reached the "framework of a deal" for the sale of TikTok's US operations to a consortium of American investors. The deal is expected to be announced by President Donald Trump and General Secretary Xi Jinping as part of broader tariff negotiations.
On September 16, the fourth and, for now, last executive order was issued to keep TikTok active in the US.
Pushing the deadline to December 16th.
So, here we are, just two weeks shy of another sell-off deadline.
Despite the White House approving a deal and assuring Americans that the app would continue to operate, there’s still no confirmation of any sale of TikTok to a U.S. entity, with the Chinese government refusing to sign off at this stage.
The current situation is a tense standstill with mixed signals.
Some sources say a deal is close, but looking at statements from Chinese officials, there’s nothing to indicate they’re planning to approve the sell-off of a Chinese company to a U.S. owner—at least not without adequate trade compensation in return.
As of now, little has changed, despite more than five years having passed since the original effort to ban TikTok. The app is still alive, although in limbo, and it remains to be seen whether there will finally be a sell-off, a ban, or just another extension.
We’ll let you know in 2026.
