The Briefing: TikTok’s Rock-Bottom Price

17:08 |

The Briefing

Sep 25, 2025

The Briefing

By Martin Peers

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Talk about a fire-sale price. That's the only way to describe the $14 billion valuation we learned today is being put on TikTok U.S. in the Trump administration–orchestrated sale of the app. Given what we've reported about TikTok parent ByteDance's revenues, and our guesstimate about how much came from TikTok, the valuation may be less than one times revenue. For a business growing as quickly as TikTok has been, that's a rock-bottom price. Meta Platforms, by contrast, is trading at 10.5 times last year's revenue, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Look at it another way. ByteDance is currently valued at about $337 billion in the secondary market for private tech stocks, according to Caplight. While TikTok is likely less than a quarter of ByteDance's revenue—and may be losing money—it has been one of the most important growth engines for the Chinese tech giant. TikTok U.S. is in turn likely the most important part of the app in advertising terms. You can imagine some investors putting a valuation on TikTok U.S. of as much as $100 billion. But of course, this was a forced sale. Without it, TikTok would have had to shutter in the U.S. ByteDance likely feels that by holding only 19.9%—part of the deal—it will retain some value in the longer term.

As Vice President JD Vance said, the price is a "good deal" for investors buying into TikTok, a group that includes Oracle, Silver Lake and reportedly MGX, the Abu Dhabi–based venture firm. Bloomberg reported today that those three will each take 15%. The $14 billion number means they only have to put up $2.1 billion each—particularly good news for Oracle, which is now short of cash thanks to its heavy investment in artificial intelligence.

ByteDance's existing U.S. investors, such as Sequoia Capital, Susquehanna International Group and KKR, might not be happy, but they're expected to get the chance to buy more shares as part of the deal, which might ease their pain. All in all, while the price is ridiculously low, the deal may be the best ByteDance's shareholders could have hoped for. The uncertainty overhanging TikTok's future will lift, perhaps even clearing the way for ByteDance to go public.

Google's Revelations

Google's lawyers are busy this week dealing with the other antitrust case it has been fighting—over its ad tech unit, which helps websites sell ad space and advertisers buy ads. In April, a court found that Google had a monopoly in the market for publishers selling ad space, and the government wants it to divest that part of the business.

Today in court—where The Information's Catherine Perloff has been monitoring proceedings—a Google ad executive, Tim Craycroft, revealed that Google considered selling part of its ad tech unit both in 2021 (in what was code-named Project Sunday) and last year. Also in 2021, Google considered putting part of its ad tech business into Google Cloud, where it could sell its software as a service. That was dubbed Project Monday. (More here.)

Craycroft didn't explain why any of these things happened. He didn't volunteer this information lightly: He was on the witness stand at the behest of the government, which wanted to show Google could break off the ad tech unit if it wanted to. Google, not surprisingly, has been arguing the opposite. More to come on this case.

In Other News

• Cloud AI provider Databricks, through a new agreement with OpenAI, will be able to host models such as GPT-5 for its customers, in a move to address the data security concerns of Fortune 500 companies. The partnership enables Databricks' customers to run OpenAI's models and design AI agents directly within the Databricks platform.

• Elon Musk's xAI sued OpenAI for hiring away several employees that xAI alleges stole trade secrets. Staff that have jumped from xAI to OpenAI include several engineers and former Chief Financial Officer Mike Liberatore.

• Amazon will pay $2.5 billion to settle the Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit over the e-commerce firm's alleged use of deceptive practices to unknowingly lock consumers into its Prime membership, the FTC announced Thursday.

• The U.S. government said Thursday it had signed a deal with Elon Musk's xAI that will allow federal workers to use the Grok chatbot for a nominal fee. The government announced similar deals with OpenAI and Anthropic last month.

• OpenAI agreed to purchase up to $6.5 billion of cloud services from CoreWeave, pushing its contracted spending with the cloud provider to about $22.4 billion, the companies said Thursday.

Today on The Information's TITV

Check out today's episode of TITV in which Forerunner founder Kirsten Green talks about how AI has changed consumer investing.

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