Blackstone Bows Out of TikTok Bidding War Just as Trump Says Billionaires Are Lining Up

Over the past year or so, the headlines have taken some weird turns… Chinese spy balloons floating overhead, the Epstein Files blowing up again, and, the most random social media viral meme… a CEO getting caught on the kiss cam with his HR mistress at a Coldplay concert (didn’t have public infidelity to Fix You on my bucket list for this summer).

But not too long ago, before all that, TikTok was the thing keeping lawmakers up at night. What started as a harmless app for lip-syncing and questionable dance trends suddenly got treated like a digital Trojan Horse sent straight from Beijing.

Not because of the filters. Not even because of the trend where people pretend to clean their rooms for views. No… because ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is based in China. And in Washington, that’s basically the equivalent of putting a “MAY CONTAIN SPYWARE” label on a teenager’s phone.

So, naturally, Congress did what Congress does: wrote a bill with an unnecessarily long name and dramatic consequences. In 2024, they passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act… or PAFACA for short. The bill gave ByteDance a deadline: either sell off TikTok’s U.S. operations by January 19, 2025, or get the app kicked out of every App Store in America.

Well, as you know, that deadline has now come and gone… and TikTok’s still very much alive, still very much on your teenager’s phone. So what happened? Like most major policy moves in Washington, the law quickly ran into legal friction.

ByteDance sued to block the law. TikTok creators sued too (because if you take away their platform, how else are they supposed to sell ED pills and oversized water bottles?). And now, everything’s tied up in federal court, where the future of the app hangs on a First Amendment fight that might drag into 2026 (so much for hard deadlines). Meanwhile, Trump’s still acting like the TikTok deal is alive, claiming he’s got “very wealthy people” lined up to buy it. He won’t name names (shocking, I know) but the usual suspects keep popping up: Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Andreessen Horowitz, General Atlantic, Susquehanna International Group, and (even for a hot minute) Blackstone.

The $1 trillion private equity juggernaut that owns everything from rental homes to data centers… and, weirdly, my old apartment. No joke, my landlord was literally Blackstone. So when I heard they were circling TikTok, I just assumed they’d tack on a “processing fee” every time I opened the app. But apparently, even Blackstone has a line. They quietly pulled out of the deal without much to say at all. And that, to me, says everything.

This is Blackstone we’re talking about. They’ll invest in toll roads, foreclosed homes, and parking garages in Florida if there’s a decent return. Walking away from TikTok to me is a billboard-sized red flag. And frankly, the deal is starting to reek. Yes, TikTok is still a giant…bringing in $43 billion last quarter and officially overtaking Meta in the process. It remains the undisputed king of the attention economy, swallowing up screen time like it’s free air. Under normal circumstances, that kind of growth would have private equity firms lining up with blank checks.

But there’s a major issue: any U.S. ownership shift still requires approval from China. And Beijing’s not exactly rushing to hand over one of its biggest tech exports while the U.S. tariff war isn’t completely over yet. Needless to say, the whole thing is stuck. ByteDance is reportedly working on a U.S.-specific version of the app to comply with the law… but without Beijing’s blessing, that’s clearly just a political stunt.

Oracle and a few others are still hanging around, pretending the deal might still happen. But Blackstone? They read the room and dipped before anyone tried to pin this mess on them.

And that might be the clearest sign yet: this deal is too murky, too legally unstable, and too politically explosive for anyone with a functioning risk department to touch.

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