Other potential buyers include the philanthropist Frank Mccourt ’s Project Liberty, which is raising capital to make a bid for TikTok in order to “rearchitect the platform” and protect user data. McCourt is a billionaire who previously owned the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team. The project is supported by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

Content creator Jimmy Donaldson, known on the Internet as MrBeast, has made it clear he is interested in buying TikTok. Donaldson has the most subscribers of any user on YouTube— over 340 million—and boasts over 113 million TikTok followers.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that China was considering a TikTok sale to Elon Musk, the world's richest man and a close ally of President Trump, who already owns the social media platform X.

With this mandate handed down, panic set in as U.S. TikTok fans wondered if someone would step forth to buy the platform to keep it open to them. Popular influencer Jimmy Donaldson, known throughout social media as MrBeast,