U.S. TikTok for $14 Billion? Making Sense of the Bargain-Basement Price.

Much remains unknown about a deal that values the U.S. version of TikTok at $14 billion. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Vice President JD Vance said this week that a new joint venture controlling the U.S. version of Chinese viral video app, TikTok, would be valued at $14 billion, coming in well below what observers had expected.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order which laid out the administration’s understanding of the deal, and how it complies with a 2024 law that required TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to divest the app or be banned from U.S. app stores.

But much remains unknown about the deal. Some of those missing details could explain the surprisingly low valuation. China-based ByteDance, the parent of TikTok, has raised roughly $19 billion from investors, according to PitchBook, most recently at a valuation of $220 billion.

ByteDance and the Chinese government haven’t yet publicly commented on what was laid out in the executive order. On Monday, a senior White House official told reporters to soon expect ByteDance “to sign a framework agreement with one or more managing investors, new investors, to set up the parameters of this deal.” That hasn’t happened yet.

But one reason for the lower valuation could be the relatively mature nature of the U.S. social-media market. Much of ByteDance’s valuation is likely tied to the faster-growing global market.

In fact, at Meta Platforms, Snapchat, and Pinterest, U.S. revenue and user growth has slowed compared with the rest of the world. In the last three years Meta’s revenue from the U.S. has grown by 23%, but that figure is 51% for the rest of the world. At Snapchat, U.S. sales growth was 3% in the period but 20% in the rest of the world.

Meta doesn’t break out users by region; at Snapchat, North American daily users shrunk by 3% from the second quarter of 2023 to the second quarter of 2025, while in the rest of the world, users grew by 25%. For Pinterest, monthly North American users grew by 7% in the same period, versus 28% for the rest of the world.

Still, U.S. users are more valuable than those overseas. Snapchat’s average North American revenue per user was $8.75 in the second quarter, $2.58 in Europe, and $1.10 in the rest of the world.

The new U.S. TikTok entity would be valued roughly in line with SnapChat’s total market value of $13 billion. In 2024, 58% of SnapChat’s revenue came from the U.S.

Meta doesn’t operate in China, but 11% of its 2024 revenue came from there, mainly from Chinese companies like Temu and Shein advertising to U.S. users.

The final details of the deal, if and when it comes, will likely have the most to contribute to the deal’s valuation. On Friday, Reuters reported that a ByteDance subsidiary would manage the revenue-generating parts of the business like advertising and e-commerce. A separate report from Bloomberg said that the subsidiary would keep half the profits, despite having less-than-20% ownership of the U.S. joint venture. Such a profit split would depress the value of the U.S. joint venture.

Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com