This is pretty much a ban. Why would the company convert their main product into a competitor? Majority of congress isn't stupid and knows what they want to happen.
Because the shareholders would most likely rather have X billion dollars from selling the company than 0 dollars from refusing to sell and getting banned.
It wouldn't be 0 dollars, though; the majority of their users are apparently outside the US. So the question is: how does the amount you could get by selling a US-inclusive Tiktok compare the potential future earnings of a US-free Tiktok? If the market prices it accurately, you'd sort of expect the former to be higher (a US-inclusive version seems obviously more valuable), but maybe they think the market undervalues them, or maybe prospective buyers would smell blood in the water because of the deadline and try to low-ball, etc.
> Why would the company convert their main product into a competitor?
Thats easy to answer.
The reason why is because they'd get paid 10s of billions of billions of dollars for it, and otherwise their investment would massively lose a large amount of value otherwise.
Also, bytedance wouldn't be competing with tiktok anymore in those markets as they'd have sold it off.
So the choice is either to make a bunch of money, or to instead have their investment become worthless.
