Could TikTok be banned again and who might buy it?

President Donald Trump has said a deal to sell TikTok will be made by 5 April, as questions swirl over whether the app will be banned in the United States.

The platform 'went dark' for US users in January as a law took effect which banned the app unless it was sold by its parent company ByteDance.

But TikTok returned less than a day later following Trump's election win, and he signed an executive order delaying its sale or ban by 75 days.

Tech companies, celebrities and investors have since lined up to buy the app.

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

Trump signed such an order regarding TikTok's sale or ban on 21 January, shortly after his inauguration.

But the president'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".

It allows the president to directly oppose a ruling by the Supreme Court upholding the law to ban TikTok on 17 January.

The Supreme Court's ruling 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".

Trump's extended deadline for TikTok's sale or ban gives ByteDance until 5 April to find a buyer.

If no deal is reached the app could once again face a US ban and be pulled from mobile app stores.

However, Trump could 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 allowing people to download TikTok onto their devices - meaning the law would remain in place but would essentially be redundant.

TikTok returned to Google's Play Store and Apple's App Store in February, after the companies were reportedly told they would not face consequences for hosting it.

Trump has also said he would "probably" extend the deadline, if needed.

ByteDance has long insisted that TikTok is not for sale, and whether that has changed under Trump's presidency remains unclear.

The president told reporters on 30 March there were "a lot of potential buyers" and "tremendous interest" in buying the app.

He said earlier in March his administration was talking to four different groups about a potential sale.

Trump appears to want to find a compromise that complies with the spirit rather than the letter of law.

He has also floated the idea of TikTok being jointly owned - telling reporters he was seeking a 50-50 partnership between "the United States" and ByteDance.

Meanwhile, several names have been floated as potential buyers of the company.

Trump said he would be open to selling TikTok to Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, as well as Elon Musk.

Previous names linked with buying TikTok include billionaire Frank McCourt and the Canadian businessman Kevin O'Leary - a celebrity investor on Shark Tank, the US version of Dragon's Den.

Alexis Ohanian, who co-founded Reddit, said in a post on X in March he had joined Mr McCourt's bid.

"The list of people who do not want to buy TikTok is much smaller than the list who do," Mr Musk replied.

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.

Companies including Microsoft are even among those involved in discussions to buy TikTok, according to Trump.

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

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.