CASPER, Wyo. — Casper-based entrepreneur Reid Rasner has announced a $47.45 billion bid to acquire a controlling stake in social media platform TikTok and establish its American headquarters in Wyoming.
Rasner said the deal would ensure the beloved platform’s continued existence for 170 million U.S. users and establish a global technology hub in Wyoming with economic impacts on par with the state’s energy, tourism, and agricultural sectors.
Rasner told Oil City News on Thursday that Wyoming’s energy resources, supercomputers and database centers make it an ideal home base for the company and would create thousands of high-paying jobs, including for the homegrown workforce.
“The hardest few months are behind us,” Rasner said of the high-stakes, time-sensitive deal on Tuesday.
TIkTok will cease to exist in America on April 4 without a deal ensuring that its China-based parent company ByteDance divests from the U.S. market and sells to an American company, Rasner said.
Citing concerns about Chinese authorities accessing U.S. user data, Congress passed a law signed by then-president Joe Biden last year to ban the video-sharing platform in January 2025 unless ByteDance agreed to sell its operations in the U.S. to an American company.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law in January, including the provision that ByteDance sell the proprietary algorithm that fuels the endless stream of video content uncannily attuned to the user’s interests.
After the platform went dark for half a day last month, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order securing a 75 day stay on the ban in hopes that an American company will step up to the plate.
Rasner, a Casper native and Natrona County High School graduate, says that Rasner Media LLC has made the strongest bid yet to be that company.
“It would be a clean break from China on day one,” Rasner said. He said he’s been working for months with engineers and other professionals to ensure that the deal would satisfy every component of law.
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