ByteDance is launching another employee share buyback, which will value the company at over $330 billion.
Per Reuters, the new programme will allow staff to sell their shares back to the company at $200.41 each, an increase of 5.5% from the $189.90 offer made six months ago.
This comes on the back of strong financial results. In the second quarter of 2025, ByteDance reported revenue of about $48 billion, a 25% rise compared with last year.
That performance pushed the Chinese company ahead of Meta, whose revenue for the same period stood at $42.3 billion. In the first quarter, ByteDance had already overtaken Meta with $43 billion in revenue.
Regular buybacks have become a hallmark of the Beijing-based firm, enabling employees to unlock some of the value of their holdings.
Unlike other privately held giants such as SpaceX or OpenAI, which depend on external investors to fund similar programmes, ByteDance pays for its own buybacks directly from its balance sheet. That choice is widely read as a sign of financial strength and high profit margins.
Alongside rewarding employees, ByteDance is ploughing money into its artificial intelligence vision. In 2025 alone, the company plans to spend more than $12 billion on AI infrastructure.
About $5.5 billion is earmarked for chips in China, while $6.8 billion will be used overseas to build large-scale model training capacity powered by Nvidia processors. The company’s chatbot, Doubao, already has 71 million monthly active users as of late 2024, showing growth beyond social media.
Still, ByteDance is still locked in a political case over TikTok’s future in the United States. A law passed in Washington requires the company to sell off TikTok’s U.S. arm or face a nationwide ban. The deadline, now set for September 17, 2025, has been extended several times by President Donald Trump.
“U.S. buyers were lined up for TikTok and the deadline could be pushed back again,” Trump said last week, though some lawmakers argue that repeated delays are ignoring national security risks.
A joint venture led by Susquehanna International Group, General Atlantic, KKR, and Andreessen Horowitz is expected to take control of TikTok’s U.S. business.
Blackstone, however, has withdrawn from the consortium after setbacks in the deal process. People familiar with the matter say TikTok’s U.S. operations are still loss-making, even as the broader ByteDance group stays profitable.
To ease issues among its American workforce, the company has considered launching a standalone app for U.S. users.
ByteDance did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the buyback.
