Kevin O’Leary says he would ‘love to do a TikTok deal,’ but the law prevents it
Kevin O’Leary is seen in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on May 28, 2024.
James Devaney | Gc Images | Getty Images
Canadian investor Kevin O’Leary is still interested in a TikTok deal, but it’s not possible under current law, he told CNBC, as President Donald Trump extended the deadline for a ban on the social media platform.
As part of a wave of executive orders on Monday, Trump delayed by 75 days the imposition of a law that would effectively ban TikTok in the U.S., allowing for “an opportunity to determine the appropriate course of action.”
Trump had promised the move in a social media post on Sunday, also floating a deal that would see the platform stay active under a joint venture with 50% American ownership.
“That 50/50 deal, I would love to work with Trump on, so would every other potential buyer … But the problem with some of these ideas is they are inconsistent with the ruling of the Supreme Court,” said O’Leary, widely known from his role in ABC’s “Shark Tank.”
The investor announced that he, along with “The People’s Bid for TikTok,” an effort led by Project Liberty Founder Frank McCourt, had offered ByteDance $20 billion in cash to buy TikTok in an appearance on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.”
Speaking to CNBC, he said the proposed deal did not include ByteDance’s TikTok algorithm, which has been a key point of scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers, adding that his group had its own alternative.
TikTok temporarily temporarily went dark in the the U.S. after the Supreme Court upheld the law Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, or PAFACA.
McCourt confirmed to CNBC that the Project Liberty team remained “ready to work collaboratively with the Trump Administration, ByteDance, and a consortium of American partners” to finalize a deal and keep TikTok online.
“Project Liberty has a proven tech stack that is already in use and offers a clear path to address the national security concerns of Congress while keeping TikTok operational,” he added.
Legal hurdles
Firms involved with TikTok have had differing reactions to Trump’s executive order. Service providers such as Oracle and Akamai have willingly kept TikTok online, while Apple and Google are yet to restore ByteDance-owned apps on their stores.
According to O’Leary, while Trump’s ban extension has likely lent protection to the likes of Oracle and Akamai, it’s unclear if ByteDance’s deadline to divest will be extended.
“What we need is not really a 75 day extension. What we need is to go back and ask congress to open the order and provide for these new options, because they’re not provided for right now,” he said.
“I would love to do a deal, if the law provided for it, but I don’t have the luxury of breaching the order of the Congress,” he added.
Law experts who spoke to CNBC agreed that the legal status of TikTok and Trump’s executive order remained uncertain and that any efforts to make a TikTok deal could face challenges.
“The Order does not appear to comply with the statute. Congress carefully included certain dates and procedures in the law, which SCOTUS found to be constitutional,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.
“Thus, a federal court could find that the Order violates the law and invalidate it,” he said, noting, however, that such an action could take a long time if the government appealed to SCOTUS.
Sarah Kreps, Director at the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University, agreed the executive order was not consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision, adding that it said nothing about progress toward a qualified divestiture.
Given that violators of the TikTok law could face billions in fines, it’s not entirely prudent for parties to take Trump’s assurances over the law and SCOTUS’s ruling, Kreps said.
“They’re certainly gambling with the law and putting considerable faith in executive authority,” she added.
China softens stance?
O’Leary told CNBC that TikTok could fetch $20-$30 billion on the market in March last year, a huge discount, given any sale would likely exclude the platform’s algorithms.
Instead, the value in a potential deal was the opportunity to gain the strong domestic brand of TikTok and its over 100 million users, he said.
Still, around the time conversations about a TikTok sale ramped up, Beijing was seen as a major barrier to a BytdeDance divestment.
China, however, recently signaled openness to a deal that would see U.S. companies gain ownership of the platform.
“When it comes to actions such as the operation and acquisition of businesses, we believe they should be independently decided by companies in accordance with market principles,” a Beijing spokesperson told reporters Monday when asked about President Donald Trump’s proposal.
According to O’Leary, any potential sale of ByteDance is still expected to be negotiated between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“With TikTok, I have the right to either sell it or close it, and we’ll make that determination and we may have to get an approval from China too,” Trump told reporters following his inauguration.
While signing the executive order, the President reportedly suggested that he could impose tariffs on China if Beijing failed to approve a U.S. deal with TikTok. On Monday stateside, he said he would consider the likelihood of Tesla CEO Elon Musk or Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison buying TikTok.
Meanwhile, O’Leary told CNBC that he was in Washington still working on a potential TikTok deal with U.S. lawmakers.
Partiful’s CEO, Shreya Murthy, and CTO, Joy Tao
Courtesy: Partiful
When Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao decided to launch a party-planning startup in 2020, they settled on a business goal of “bringing people together in person.”
The Covid-19 pandemic demanded the exact opposite.
Despite the challenge of the pandemic, Partiful survived, and five years later, the New York startup is now used by millions of people to plan events such as birthday parties, housewarmings and weddings.
The app’s a favorite of those ages 20 to 30, and it’s added 2 million new users since January, Partiful CEO Murthy told CNBC. The company has never revealed its exact base of monthly users.
Partiful drew attention on social media after Apple, known for replicating features from popular apps on the iPhone, launched its own event-planning service in February, and the startup posted a joke about “copycats” on its X account.
Of course, Partiful isn’t the first party-planning app. It competes against not only Apple Invites, but also Eventbrite, Evite, Punchbowl and others.
Each service differs slightly in its target markets and features. Evite, for example, uses a “freemium” model, where certain invitation designs and other features are paywalled. Eventbrite is often used to promote and sell admission to large public events.
What sets Partiful apart from its competitors — and appeals to its Gen Z user base — is its often humorous, casual designs, some of which are created by Partiful’s in-house designers.
“Friend invited me to a gathering that doesn’t have a Partiful….feeling lost, confused, unprepared…much like when I (Gen Z) receive a phone call out of the blue,” X user Athena Kan posted in August.
For the first quarter of 2025, Partiful averaged 500,000 monthly active users, up 400% year over year, with 9 out of 10 users on the app based in the U.S., according to estimates provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower, a market research firm. That compares with Eventbrite’s 4.4 million monthly active users, which is up 2% year over year, and Punchbowl with approximately 85,000 monthly users, which is down about 2% compared to a year ago. A spokesperson for Evite told CNBC that the service saw more than 20 million monthly active users for the first quarter of 2025.
It’s unclear how many people still use Facebook’s once-popular event-planning feature Facebook Events. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, shut down the standalone app.
Sample invitations from the Partiful app
Source: Partiful
Bringing people together in real life
Murthy and Tao both went to Princeton University and worked at Palantir Technologies at the same time, but they didn’t meet until they were introduced later by a mutual friend. Both were looking to move to the consumer-facing side of tech.
Tao, then a software engineer at Meta, wanted to leave the company to focus on products that were more relatable to daily life, and said that the social media company’s goal of keeping users engaged on their apps sometimes can create “perverse incentives.”
“For me, driving more people to spend more time staring at their phone, staring at this endless feed of content, wasn’t super motivating, wasn’t super meaningful to me personally,” said Tao, Partiful’s tech chief and a self-described “avid party planner.”
Meta declined to comment.
Tao and Murthy went through a sort of “dating period” where they asked each other what they thought leading a startup together could look like. Among the voids they identified was how intimate social events, such as birthday parties where a host would be likely to see the attendees again, were still planned on text chains that made it difficult to track, communicate or plan an ideal event time with guests.
“If you’re not sure when people are free, that’s a really annoying problem,” Murthy said.
She and Tao took the leap.
With few in-person events happening during the 2020 lockdowns, Partiful’s engineering team focused on building the platform’s text message-based infrastructure so that the service could be used by both iPhone and Android users.
Partiful’s team, which has now grown to 25, operates out of downtown Brooklyn. The service is no longer limited to text messages and its website. The company launched apps for the iPhone and Android devices in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and Partiful now serves as a one-stop destination for organizing the different phases of planning and hosting a party. The company has reportedly raised $20 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Speaking Gen Z’s language
What makes Partiful fun for users is how customizable an invite can be.
Hosts can create a free birthday invite with a lime-green parody cover of Charli XCX’s “brat” album, for example, or plan a girls’ night out with a cover photo of Shrek in sunglasses. They can track “yes,” “no” or “maybe” RSVPs under a portrait of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, and invited guests can use a “boop” feature to send random emojis rather than a direct message to each other.
Party planners can also send out uniform text blasts to the group before and after the event and manage an in-app photo album for uploading memories.
Partiful is available for anyone to use, but Murthy said the company sees the most need for the service among young users in the “postgrad” period of life. That’s a stage where people might be moving to new cities and away from their established college friend groups.
“You’re starting your adult life and have to not only figure out, ‘How do I rent an apartment? How do I work a new job? How do I exist in this new version of myself?'” Murthy said. “On top of that, you’re also having to rebuild your entire social circle.”
For the hosts and partiers in its user base, Partiful has become part of their social routine, and it has continued to gain traction online. The company told CNBC that over 60% of its active app users check Partiful every week.
As for Apple, Partiful isn’t sweating its new rival just yet.
Apple Invites requires that users have an iCloud+ subscription to create events, though it’s free to RSVP if a guest doesn’t have an Apple account. That service starts at 99 cents a month in the United States. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Partiful is free, at least for now.
Like many other tech companies that rely on distribution services such as Apple’s App Store, Partiful has a nuanced relationship with its much-larger counterpart. Partiful could lose some users to Apple, but it can also benefit from promotion by the app distributor.
That’s what happened in 2024, when Partiful was named a finalist for Apple’s App Store Awards for Cultural Impact, and won Google Play’s “Best App of 2024.” The app remained an “editor’s choice” pick on the App Store as of publication.
For now, Partiful remains confident.
“We haven’t really seen any users that have been leaving Partiful for Apple Invites,” Murthy said.
WATCH: Why iPhones may get more expensive amid Trump tariffs
An attendee wearing a Super Mario costume uses a Nintendo Switch 2 game console while playing a video game during the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience at the ExCeL London international exhibition and convention centre in London, Britain, April 11, 2025.
Isabel Infantes | Reuters
Nintendo on Friday announced that retail preorder for its Nintendo Switch 2 gaming system will begin on April 24 starting at $449.99.
Preorders for the hotly anticipated console were initially slated for April 9, but Nintendo delayed the date to assess the impact of the far-reaching, aggressive “reciprocal” tariffs that President Donald Trump announced earlier this month.
Most electronics companies, including Nintendo, manufacture their products in Asia. Nintendo’s Switch 1 consoles were made in China and Vietnam, Reuters reported in 2019. Trump has imposed a 145% tariff rate on China and a 10% rate on Vietnam. The latter is down from 46%, after he instituted a 90-day pause to allow for negotiations.
Nintendo said Friday that the Switch 2 will cost $449.99 in the U.S., which is the same price the company first announced on April 2.
“We apologize for the retail pre-order delay, and hope this reduces some of the uncertainty our consumers may be experiencing,” Nintendo said in a statement. “We thank our customers for their patience, and we share their excitement to experience Nintendo Switch 2 starting June 5, 2025.”
The Nintendo Switch 2 and “Mario Kart World“ bundle will cost $499.99, the digital version “Mario Kart World” will cost $79.99 and the digital version of “Donkey Kong Bananza” will cost $69.99, Nintendo said. All of those prices remain unchanged from the company’s initial announcement.
However, accessories for the Nintendo Switch 2 will “experience price adjustments,” the company said, and other future changes in costs are possible for “any Nintendo product.”
It will cost gamers $10 more to by the dock set, $1 more to buy the controller strap and $5 more to buy most other accessories, for instance.
WATCH: Nintendo has ‘a lot of work to do’ to convince casual users to upgrade to Switch 2: Kantan Games
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