TikTok’s Struggle To Become A Global Company
The Chinese founder of TikTok wants to build the first truly global tech company that captures both Chinese and American users at once. The U.S. government will likely stop him.
In 2022, TikTok was reportedly the most-downloaded app in the world, with 672 million downloads.1 TikTok was downloaded more than all three of Meta’s flagship apps—Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook—and more than twice as much as Snapchat. In total, TikTok has been downloaded over 3 billion times.2 In 2022, TikTok had an estimated 1.6 billion monthly active users worldwide.3 In 2023, it confirmed it had 150 million monthly active users in the United States, about half the U.S. population.4 ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, is now the most valuable private startup company in the world at $140 billion and employs over 150,000 people worldwide.5