MrBeast is officially trying to buy TikTok

Ever since our new president, Donald Trump, temporarily saved TikTok from a national ban, Americans have been wondering which deep-pocketed businessman will throw his hat in the ring to buy the popular social networking platform. Now, we have a new contender: viral influencer Jimmy Donaldson (aka MrBeast). “Okay, buy Tik Tok so you don’t get banned,” Donaldson published on X last week. “Unironically I’ve had so many billionaires reach out to me since I tweeted this, let’s see if we can do this,” he added.

On Tuesday, Donaldson’s attorney told CNN that the reality TV star was serious about buying the social media platform, and that Donaldson is now part of a group of American investors who are pushing to acquire the site. Attorney Paul Hastings, who represents the group, said the offer comes in response to the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the previously issued law that would force TikTok to be sold or banned in the United States.

It makes total sense that Donaldson – that the whole business revolves around generate brain dead viral content– He would like to own the platform most responsible for the distribution of the viral content of the brain. Buying TikTok would effectively give him an infotainment monopoly which, for the world’s most powerful influencer, is basically the equivalent of winning the lottery.

The whole reason we’re in this mess to begin with is that, last April, Joe Biden signed a bill which would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell its app to a US company or face a nationwide ban. Commentators noted what a political rifle this was, given how popular TikTok is with young voters. When he returned to the White House this week, Trump easily took advantage of Biden’s unpopular decision. By signing an executive order, Trump handed TikTok the bill a 75-day extension windowduring which time ByteDance will be allowed to find a suitable buyer, as long as America gets to keep 50 percent of the ownership of the platform. Trump has already made it known that he would be open to other famous personalities buying the site – including fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.

However, there are signs that Trump could support Donaldson’s deal. Bloomberg he pointed out that Brad Bondi, the brother of Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for Attorney General, represents the investor group behind Donaldson’s push to acquire the platform. Trump and Bondi have a history together. Bondi was part of the legal team that helped bring the president’s Media & Technology Group Corp (which owns his social media platform) together. Social truth) with a blank control company last March, Bloomberg writes. The affair was widely seen as a savior for Trump when his legal problems were at their worst. Bondi also previously represented Elon Musk in 2018 when the tech billionaire was accused of securities fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission, The Lever. reported earlier.

The reason why the United States has moved so aggressively to ban its children’s favorite social media platform is not well understood. U dominant narrative it turned out that US officials are concerned about the platform’s ties to China and wanted to remove a connection between the company and its geopolitical enemy. An alternative theory, however, was that TikTok served as a popular vector from which pro-Palestinian activists can distribute evidence of Israeli atrocities, thus turning America’s children against their special ally in the Middle East. Mitt Romney said as much last year, when he said that the reason there was “overwhelming support for us to shut down” TikTok was the “enormous” number of “mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites.” An Op-ed in Time Last year he similarly blamed the plethora of pro-Palestinian content for a rise in anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses in the United States.

Since the rise of TikTok, rumors have circulated that the platform is now suppressing pro-Palestinian content. Those rumors may be slightly exaggerated, however. A 404 Media investigation published Wednesday found that the site does not seem to be suppressing pro-Palestinian content. The site told reporters that the pro-Palestinian content did not violate its terms of service.

If the purpose of bringing TikTok under US control is, indeed, to stop the flow of pro-Palestinian content to US audiences, there would be some precedent for this in the behavior of other US tech companies . A recent Human Rights Watch report on Meta found that the company had practiced “systemic censorship of Palestinian content on Instagram and Facebook.” X and YouTube they also ran into their own controversies involving the Israeli-Palestinian content.