Tik Tok : A Historical Timeline

TikTok Timeline of key events:

• March 2012: Entrepreneur Zhang Yiming founds ByteDance in Beijing.

• July 2014: The lip-sync app Musical.ly is launched by Alex Zhu.

• September 2016: ByteDance launches Douyin, the Chinese version of the app, which becomes popular in China and Thailand.

• May 2017: TikTok launches outside of mainland China.

• November 2017: ByteDance acquires Musical.ly for nearly $1 billion.

• August 2018: TikTok merges with Musical.ly, combining the platforms and user accounts into a single app under the TikTok name.

• 2018: Celebrities begin to use the app, and it ranks as a top downloaded app in various countries, such as Thailand and the US.

• February 2019: The FTC fines Musical.ly for illegally collecting children's data.

• April 2019: TikTok surpasses 1 billion downloads globally.

• May 2020: The company appoints Kevin Mayer as its CEO.

• June 2020: India bans TikTok, affecting hundreds of millions of users.

• August 2020: The Trump administration issues an executive order attempting to ban TikTok in the US, citing national security concerns.

• April 2024: President Biden signs a bill that could lead to a ban if ByteDance does not sell TikTok.

• January 2025: The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the law requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban. 

Source:  https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/14/former-treasury-secretary-mnuchin-is-putting-together-an-investor-group-to-buy-tiktok.html

According to mainstream media outlets in 2024 former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department stated an actionable and formed 'hedge fund' of sorts of investors to acquire TikTok.