What to know about TikTok owner ByteDance as U.S. considers possible ban
source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/13/who-is-tiktok-owner-bytedance/
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What to know about TikTok owner ByteDance as U.S. considers possible ban
The House of Representatives voted to pass a measure Wednesday that could lead to the forced sale or ban of video-sharing app TikTok in the United States, amid concerns that the Chinese-owned platform could be used to monitor and manipulate Americans.
The fight over TikTok, which says it has 170 million U.S. users, represents growing fears over China’s influence in the United States, especially in an election year. A nationwide ban, if it goes into effect, could posean existential threat to one of China’s most successful internet companies.
The bipartisan legislation, the future of which will be decided in the Senate, would give TikTok’s owner, the Beijing-based ByteDance, half a year to sell the short-video platformor face a ban on the Apple and Google app stores and web-hosting services in the United States.President Biden has said he would sign the legislation into law if it passes Congress.
Here’s what to know about ByteDance and the right over TikTok in Congress.
What is his relationship to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew?
Return to menuThere is relatively little information available publicly about the relationship between Zhang and Chew, who became CEO of TikTok in 2021.
In May 2021, Zhang announced in a letter to employees that he would step down as CEO of ByteDance to focus less on day-to-day management and more on long-term strategy. Liang Rubo, a ByteDance co-founder, was announced as the new CEO of ByteDance.
Last month, Chew told The Post that he is in charge of all of TikTok’s strategic decisions. But he said he routinely updates Liang on “certain topics that I think he may have an interesting point of view, just to make sure the perspective is complete.”
As The Post previously reported, Chew, a Singaporean national who grew up in Singapore, studied economics in the United Kingdom before working at Goldman Sachs for two years. He then moved to the United States to get his master’s degree at Harvard Business School. While a student there, Chew interned at Facebook, now a bitter competitor to TikTok.
Chew has said he was first introduced to DST Global, a venture capital firm that bet on major tech firms including Facebook and Twitter, while he was working at Goldman Sachs. After graduating from Harvard, he worked with DST Global as a partner, where he helped to coordinate one of the earliest investments in ByteDance by building relationships with its founding engineers, Zhang and Liang.
Drew Harwell, Helier Cheung and Lyric Li contributed to this report.
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