By the time President Trump returned to office earlier this year, TikTok’s fate should have been sealed. Congress had passed, and President Biden had signed, a law requiring the app to be banned or sold by the day before Inauguration Day. But Trump announced he would effectively pause the law. Instead, he said he would “save” the app by brokering a belated sale.
Now, Trump’s attempt to make that sale has taken shape: Last week, the White House announced a plan for TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to license a copy of the app’s algorithm to a consortium of investors, at least some of whom have been vocal supporters of Trump’s political agenda. If the plan is finalized, TikTok’s US business will fall into the hands of powerful Trump allies at a moment of unprecedented media consolidation.
But that transition, if it happens, will challenge the culture that defined TikTok in its early days. This excerpt from my book, Every Screen On the Planet: The War Over TikTok, traces one of the company’s first and most prominent run-ins with Trump: an attempt by a group of young TikTokkers to prank the president and tank attendance at one of his campaign rallies. At the time, the stunt was largely dismissed as funny—but it also revealed how TikTok, and the people using it, could shape our politics in the years to come.
Kevin Mayer is six feet, four inches tall, with a square jaw, light eyes, and a deep voice. He’s built like an offensive tackle—a position he once played on MIT’s football team—and has the unfortunate habit of sending emails with subjects in all caps. When ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming first approached him about becoming CEO of TikTok, he had served more than 20 years as an executive at Disney, where he had risen to lead the Disney+ streaming platform. He had been a candidate to succeed the conglomerate’s legendary CEO, Bob Iger, when he stepped down in early 2020. But Mayer, who had earned the nickname “Buzz Lightyear” for the way his demeanor (and jawline) resembled the Disney Pixar character, had been passed over for the job.
Yiming approached Kevin at the beginning of the pandemic. Disney’s prospects had tanked as movie theaters shuttered. But TikTok was a rocket ship Kevin, then 58, decided to take a ride on.
“I’m not getting any younger,” he said.
In May 2020, Kevin accepted an offer to become global CEO of TikTok and chief operations officer of ByteDance. In a way, TikTok was as much like Disney+ or Netflix as it was like Facebook or Google. Obviously, user-generated content was a new and different beast for Kevin. The challenge of studying what people watched and convincing them to watch more, though, was familiar—as was the job of courting and persuading advertisers that this platform offered the best value for their money.
Kevin was bright, engaged, and good with numbers. “Every meeting was a lot of energy with Kevin,” said one executive who worked with him. He was more assertive than Alex, and he wasn’t a software engineer, but that was just as well. It meant he didn’t develop or express as many strong opinions about how the technology behind TikTok should work—a topic that Yiming already felt strongly about. He could better focus on executive decision-making, and projecting confidence and competence to TikTok’s staff and the rest of the world.
For many of ByteDance’s employees, Kevin’s hiring meant there would be an IPO. IPOs—“initial public offerings”—are the vehicle by which private companies become public, finally allowing investors and employees to sell their stock. Going public was the ultimate coming-of-age moment for a startup, and most of ByteDance’s competitors, both in the US and in China, had made a lot of money doing it.
