What does Trump's executive order mean for TikTok and who might buy it?

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US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order granting TikTok a 75-day extension to comply with a law banning the app if it is not sold.

The social media platform briefly went dark in the US days before Trump took office, after the Supreme Court denied a bid by its Chinese owner ByteDance to overturn the legislation.

TikTok came back online with a short message thanking Trump for his "efforts".

An executive order is an instruction from the president which has the weight of the law behind it.

But Trump's order does not overturn the ban.

Instead it tells the US attorney general not to enforce the law for now - something experts had expected would be his first move.

That buys time for his administration to, as the order puts it, "determine the appropriate course of action."

Trump has floated the possibility of TikTok becoming a joint venture, telling reporters he was seeking a 50-50 partnership between "the United States" and ByteDance, though he did not give any further details on how that might work.

For now though the order creates a situation where the president is directly opposing a ruling made by the Supreme Court, which upheld the law to ban TikTok on 17 January.

It said the ban was "designed to prevent China - a designated foreign adversary - from leveraging its control over ByteDance to capture the personal data of US TikTok users".

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Technically, even after the 75 days have passed, it would be possible for Trump to allow the law to stand but tell the Department of Justice (DoJ) to continue to ignore it.

The government would be effectively telling Apple and Google they will not be punished for continuing to allow people to download TikTok onto their devices, meaning the law would remain in place but would essentially be redundant.

It is not clear whether the firms would continue to offer the app under these circumstances.

When Trump signed the executive order, he said "every rich person has called me" to signal their interest in TikTok.

ByteDance has long insisted that its prize asset was not for sale.

Despite this, Bloomberg News reported that the firm was considering a sale to Trump ally Elon Musk. However, TikTok described this as "pure fiction".

Billionaire Frank McCourt and the Canadian businessman Kevin O'Leary - a celebrity investor on Shark Tank, the US version of Dragon's Den - are behind a separate bid to buy the platform without its algorithm.

Mr McCourt, a former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, said he had secured $20bn (£16. 3bn) from a consortium of investors.

The biggest YouTuber in the world Jimmy Donaldson - AKA MrBeast - has also claimed he is in the running after a number of investors contacted him following an earlier tweet signalling his interest.

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A US search engine called Perplexity AI has also reportedly offered to merge with TikTok.

In March 2024, Trump's former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he wanted to put together a group to buy the app but it is not clear if he is still pursuing this.

TikTok was the only ByteDance app which came back immediately - though only for people who already had the app.

It is still not available to download from Apple and Google's app stores.

Two other apps which remain inaccessible are Lemon8, another social media app which has been compared to Pinterest, and CapCut, a video editing app.

Meanwhile Marvel Snap, a digital card game published by a ByteDance subsidiary, is now available once again after it too went down - which caught even its US-based developer Second Dinner off guard.

TikTok says it has 170 million US users who spent - on average - 51 minutes per day on the app in 2024.

Experts say rivals such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts could benefit if Trump's efforts to fully restore TikTok don't succeed.

Users bring advertisers - so this could be a big financial boost to those platforms.

"Chief marketing officers who we've spoken with confirmed that they will divert their media dollars to Meta and Google if they can no longer advertise on TikTok," said Kelsey Chickering, an analyst at market research company Forrester.

Other potential winners include Twitch, which made its name by hosting livestreams - a popular feature on TikTok. Twitch is well known particularly to gamers, though its other content is expanding too.

Other Chinese-owned platforms, such as Xiaohongshu - known as RedNote among its US users - have also seen rapid growth in the US and the UK.