TikTok Photo: JYPIX / Alamy / Profimedia
Investment firm General Atlantic is selling a stake in ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, in a deal that values the Chinese social media giant at $550 billion, two people familiar with the situation told Reuters, meaning the value of the Chinese company has risen dramatically.
The potential divestiture will be the first since the Trump administration approved the sale of ByteDance's TikTok-related US business in January, and represents a 66% increase in value from what it had under a share buyback program last year. At the time, the unlisted company was valued at more than $330 billion.
General Atlantic, which first invested in ByteDance in 2017 when the company was valued at about $20 billion, has in recent weeks begun the process of selling part of its stake and hopes to complete the deal in March, one of the sources said.
Valuations of an unlisted company can vary widely in secondary market trading, but any such new share sale is seen as a test of investor appetite for its shares.
ByteDance's market value is opaque because the shares are privately held and the terms of secondary market transactions are not made public.
ByteDance has become the largest social media company in the world
Internally, General Atlantic has valued its stake in ByteDance at $550 billion and it is reasonable to expect at least that level in the planned secondary transaction, the second source familiar with the situation said.
The proposed sale follows ByteDance's deal to make TikTok's US operations majority-owned by American investors, resolving uncertainties that have loomed over the video-sharing app since US President Donald Trump threatened to ban it on national security grounds.
ByteDance, whose revenue surpassed that of Meta – the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads – became the world's largest social media company by sales last year. Last year's profit of the company is estimated at about 48 billion dollars.
The company's core products include news aggregator Toutiao and short video app Douyin, China's equivalent of TikTok. In 2025, the company also became China's leading player in consumer AI applications thanks to its Doubao chatbot.
