Which company owns TikTok?

ByteDance owns TikTok.

ByteDance is a Chinese internet technology company founded in Beijing in 2012 by entrepreneur Zhang Yiming and several co-founders. The company first became widely known for Toutiao, a news and content platform that used recommendation algorithms to personalize users’ feeds. It later developed Douyin, TikTok’s China-focused counterpart, and launched TikTok internationally.

ByteDance expanded TikTok globally by acquiring Musical.ly in 2017 and merging that service into TikTok in 2018. The merger helped TikTok inherit Musical.ly’s international user base and accelerate its growth outside China. TikTok is therefore part of ByteDance’s wider portfolio of technology and media products.

The ownership question is sometimes confused by the fact that ByteDance has investors from several countries and that TikTok operates through regional subsidiaries. Those corporate and investment relationships do not change the basic answer: ByteDance is TikTok’s parent company. Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent are major Chinese technology companies, but none owns TikTok.