With TikTok being removed from the App Store and people unable to download it, iPhones with the app installed on them are being sold for tens of thousands of dollars on the auction site eBay. Following TikTok being briefly banned over the weekend, it is no longer available in the United States for anyone who doesn't already have it on their phone. This means that anyone who deleted TikTok, thinking it was not going to be of any use to them anymore, was stunned to find out the next day that it would have started working again when President Donald Trump took office.
So, as a result of so many people now regretting their decision to delete TikTok off of their phones, people are offering to sell their iPhones with the app installed on it for thousands of dollars on sites like eBay.
According to UPI, "At least two iPhones listed as containing the app were sold after being listed for $10,000, but it was unclear what sum was actually paid by the buyers, as the completed listings note 'best offer accepted.'" Another iPhone 15 was sold after two bids for $3,100.
Multiple other ongoing listings are attempting to sell TikTok-enabled iPhones for prices ranging from $100 to $35,000, with one optimistic seller listing an iPhone 15 with TikTok and CapCut, a video editing app with the same Chinese parent company as TikTok, asking $4.9 million.
$4,970,400 to be exact. Or best offer.
Wired reported on Wednesday that there are more than 9,000 eBay item listings for smartphones that have TikTok installed on them. Some of the listings they saw are for as much as $50,000.
Donald Trump's executive order delayed any potential ban of TikTok for 75 days. That means that anyone paying thousands of dollars for an iPhone with the app on could be spending all of that money for just a couple of months of use.
And these iPhones are being sold. Wired reports, "Select the 'sold' filter on eBay's search and there are plenty of sales that appear to be completed, but pretty much all of them have an undisclosed 'best offer accepted' note connected to them."
Maybe it will all work out for those people though. There are still rumors floating about that MrBeast, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison, former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers Frank McCourt, Trump's former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, or Elon Musk might try and buy TikTok. McCourt and a consortium he created has reportedly has even offered ByteDance $20 billion for TikTok.