Analysts Scream "Highway Robbery" as Trump Hands Larry Ellison TikTok for Pennies on the Dollar

I cannot wait for the “Larry Ellison Buys TikTok for a Bag of Chips” headline to drop…

Yesterday, Vice President JD Vance sent everyone’s jaws to the floor when he said (on live tv) Trump’s TikTok deal would peg the app’s U.S. operations at around $14 billion. That number was so low investors had to check if he was reading a Babylon Bee headline… like, did he mean $40B? $100B? Nope. Just $14B.

And for context, analysts had TikTok U.S. worth anywhere between $30B-$40B without the algorithm and up to $100B if ByteDance threw that magic code into the deal. But Donny Politics has other plans: a foreclosure steal that makes Instagram’s $1B acquisition in 2012 look like paying sticker price at a BMW dealership.

So what the f*** is actually happening here?

Trump gave ByteDance an offer straight out of The Godfather: sell TikTok U.S. or pack your bags and GTFO. Oracle (running on Larry Ellison’s “Magic AI Internet Money” valuation) and Silver Lake are lining up to buy. And as for ByteDance, they’ll be allowed to keep less than 20%... just enough to feel insulted (‘Merica).

(Source: Bloomberg)

Now here’s where the math gets just plain silly. TikTok pulls in north of $10B a year in U.S. revenue. At a $14B valuation, that’s a price-to-sales ratio of about 1.4x… the same neighborhood as ExxonMobil and General Mills. You know, slow-growth cereal and oil companies. By comparison, Meta trades at 10x, YouTube’s parent Alphabet sits at 8x. So yeah… calling this an armed robbery is like calling Warren Buffett “kinda good at stocks.”

Ashwin Binwani, who runs Alpha Binwani Capital, couldn’t believe it was real: “This could be the most undervalued tech acquisition of the decade.” Translation: if Oracle and friends close this deal, it’s basically stealing candy from a $170 million-user baby.

The deal also has a 120-day shot clock. ByteDance either signs off or risks watching its most prized possession vanish from the U.S. app stores. Trump says Xi Jinping gave his blessing, but Beijing hasn’t exactly RSVP’d to that narrative yet.

And then there’s the execution problem: Oracle is a database company. Silver Lake is a PE shop. MGX is an Abu Dhabi investor. None of them have any clue how to run a consumer-facing app that makes teenagers dance on camera for dopamine. But right now, the only thing that matters is Trump’s ultimatum.

As Alvin Foo, a VC watching this circus, put it best: “It’s like you’re putting a gun to ByteDance and saying ‘sell or you stop.’” If this actually closes at $14B (and China doesn’t realize how dumb this makes them look), it’ll go down as the heist of the decade century… not by hackers, but by ole Larry Ellison.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Meta, Exxon, and Alphabet as mentioned in the article.