Potential buyers for TikTok US include MrBeast, Kevin O'Leary, Frank McCourt's Project Liberty and Perplexity AI, who bid a merger instead of a sale,

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would be supportive of the world's richest man and his close aide, Elon Musk, buying TikTok "if he wanted to". Trump was asked if he would be open to the billionaire founder of Tesla buying the short-video platform facing a nationwide ban in the US after the Supreme Court last week upheld a law requiring TikTok to sever ties with its Chinese parent ByteDance.

Notably, RedNote (Xiaohongshu) is still available for download from the U.S. app store, despite being a Chinese-owned platform subject to China's data privacy and censorship laws. In the lead-up to TikTok's banning, many users have flocked to the video-forward platform as a potential alternative.

TikTok restored access to U.S. users Sunday afternoon following a brief outage, after a federal law took effect that bans companies from hosting TikTok and other ByteDance-owned apps unless ByteDance divests from the apps,

TikTok was banned in the U.S. due to national security concerns over its Chinese ownership, prompting federal action requiring ByteDance to divest. Despite delays in enforcement, the app remains unavailable in US app stores until a sale to a U.