Katie McManus proposes turning TikTok into a user-owned cooperative. At $50 billion valuation and 148 million U.S. users, each person would need to pay $237.84 to buy it outright. If half the users paid $9 a month, they'd raise the full amount in about six years.
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We have some breaking news here about TikTok. The House of Representatives just passed a bill that would require bite.
Here's a crazy idea to save TikTok, and I want you to come here. What if we bought it? No, like seriously, what if TikTok in the United States became a co op where every single person who works for TikTok in the United States and who is a user on the platform becomes part owner. Kind of like rei, which if you're not familiar, you should go look it up. They operate like a co op. It's incredible. If you didn't watch that video, then I want you to go and watch it and start paying attention to the different reports of the types of companies that are looking to buy TikTok in the United States if it's forced to be divested from. These are companies that we do not want influencing us in that way. So what if we didn't let them? Okay, I actually did the math. So if we were to buy TikTok after it's quote unquote banned and there has, it has to be divested from the valuation, currently is $50 billion. Now I, I didn't do a whole lot of deep homework here, okay? I don't know if that's $50 billion overall or if it's $50 billion here in the United States, but let's just say that is the asking price. All right? Currently in the United States alone, TikTok has 148 million million with an M unique users. Okay? And so let's just really quick math. 50 billion divided by 148 million means that each user we were to buy it outright would pay 300, $237.84 to buy it for 50 billion. Now want to acknowledge that not everyone is going to see that as worth it. Not everyone is going to have an extra $337 kicking around. And that's okay. We don't necessarily need everyone. We can do a whole bunch of different kind of math to make it work for users across the board. However, let's just say that 50% of those people decided to buy TikTok and make it a co op. All right? That would bring us down to 74 million human beings who are using TikTok here in the United States. Now let's assume we just make this as simple as possible for the user. Okay? We don't make it super expensive upfront and we just turn it into kind of like a monthly subscription. Okay? So let's say we were to roll out the purchase program as like a $9 a month agreement. Okay, $9 a month, okay, for half of the users on TikTok. All right, so 74 million human beings paying $9 a month for 12 months out of the year each year, that would raise approximately $7,992,000,000 to pay down what we owe on the company. And if that is how much is being raised each year, then it would take us approximately 6.26 years to full 50 billion to acquire the company. Now, I want to underline that this $9 a month is not just like a random subscription fee, okay? It's not something that you sign up for on the Apple Store and then if you don't use it, you don't get anything out of it. The $9 a month is literally paying for your ownership in TikTok. Okay? Which means that over time, you are going to be a stakeholder, which stakeholders, when the company does well, tend to make some money. Of course, it's not going to be a whole lot of money if you're only paying $9 a month, but it's not like you're getting nothing out of it. And also then we get to keep the app and we get to have some control over it. Another thing that I want you to really acknowledge is that a lot of the companies and the people who are like Talking about buying TikTok, they are also some of the key players that are pushing on this legislation that would get TikTok banned and require the company that owns it to divest. And as much as we'd like to believe otherwise, they're not stupid, okay? They see how influential this app is. They see how much we can share with each other across this app, and they want to be able to manipulate that for their own purposes. So friends at large, economists, people who know actual shit about mergers and acquisitions and this kind of stuff, is this actually a viable idea? Would you buy TikTok if we made it into a co op? I want to hear from you in the comments.
