The U.S. House approved legislation that would push Chinese social media giant TikTok to divest from its owner ByteDance to evade being banned from the U.S.
The lawmakers voted 352 in favor of the proposed law and 65 against, in a rare moment of bipartisan unity in politically divided Washington.
ByteDance has rocketed in recent years to become one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth around $225 billion, according to market intelligence firm CP Insights.
That puts it well above Elon Musk’s SpaceX and ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
ByteDance launched TikTok in 2017, and the app took the world by storm, crossing a billion users in four years.
The app was an international version of Douyin, which was released in China in 2016 and now has hundreds of millions of users.
Thanks to the explosive growth of these apps, ByteDance has branched out into e-commerce and travel bookings and also released a video editing app.
The Chinese company says it has more than 150,000 employees in almost 120 cities worldwide.
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