MrBeast Is Officially Trying to Buy TikTok

Ever since our new president, Donald Trump, temporarily saved TikTok from a nationwide ban, Americans have wondered which deep-pocketed businessman will throw his hat in the ring to buy the popular social media platform. Now, we have a new contender: viral influencer Jimmy Donaldson (aka MrBeast). “Okay fine, I’ll buy Tik Tok so it doesn’t get banned,” Donaldson posted 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 pull this off,” he added.

On Tuesday, Donaldson’s attorney communicated to CNN that the reality TV star was serious about buying the social media platform, and that Donaldson is now part of a group of U.S. investors who are pushing to procure the site. The Paul Hastings law firm, which is representing the group, has said that the bid 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 U.S.

It makes total sense that Donaldson—whose whole business revolves around generating braindead viral content—would want to own the platform most responsible for distributing braindead viral content. Buying TikTok would effectively hand 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 that would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to either sell its app to a U.S. company or face a nationwide ban. Commentators have noted what a political fumble this was, given how overwhelmingly 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 gave the TikTok bill a 75-day extension window, during which time ByteDance will be allowed to find a suitable buyer, provided America gets to retain 50 percent ownership of the platform. Trump has already made it known that he would be open to other well-known personalities purchasing the site—including fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.

There are signs that Trump could be supportive of the Donaldson deal, however. Bloomberg has reported that Brad Bondi, the brother of Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for Attorney General, is representing 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 merge the president’s struggling Trump Media & Technology Group Corp (which owns his social media platform, Truth Social) with a blank check company last March, Bloomberg writes. The deal was broadly viewed as a bailout for Trump when his legal troubles 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 previously reported.

The reason why the U.S. has so aggressively moved to ban its children’s favorite social media platform isn’t fully understood yet. The dominant narrative has been that U.S. officials are worried about the platform’s ties to China and wanted to sever a connection between the company and its geopolitical foe. An alternative theory, however, has been that TikTok has served as a popular vector by which pro-Palestinian activists can distribute evidence of Israeli atrocities, thus turning America’s children against its special ally in the Middle East. Mitt Romney said as much last year, when he intimated that the reason there was “overwhelming support for us to shut down” TikTok was the “overwhelming” number of “mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites.” An op-ed in Time last year similarly blamed the plethora of pro-Palestinian content for a rise in anti-semitic incidents on college campuses in the U.S.

Ever since TikTok’s resurrection, 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 did not seem to be consistently suppressing pro-Palestinian content. The site communicated to journalists that pro-Palestinian content did not violate its terms of service.

If the point of bringing TikTok under U.S. control is, indeed, to halt the flow of pro-Palestinian content to U.S. audiences, there would be a certain precedent for it in the behavior of other American tech companies. A recent Human Rights Watch report on Meta found that the company had been practicing “systemic censorship of Palestine content on Instagram and Facebook.” X and YouTube have also ran into their own controversies involving Israeli-Palestinian content.