Ever since our new president, Donald Trump, temporarily saved TikTok from a national ban, Americans have been wondering which businessman will throw his hat in the ring to buy the popular platform. social media. Today, we have a new contender: viral influencer Jimmy Donaldson (aka MrBeast). “Okay fine, I’ll buy Tik Tok so I don’t get banned,” Donaldson posted by X last week. “Unironically I’ve had a lot of billionaires reach out to me since I tweeted this, let’s see if we can do it,” he added.

On Tuesday, Donaldson’s attorney CNN announced that the reality TV star is serious about buying the social media platform, and that Donaldson is already part of a group of US investors pushing to buy the site. The Paul Hastings law firm, which represents the group, said the bid comes in response to the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a previously issued law that would have forced TikTok to be sold or banned in the US.

It makes perfect sense that Donaldson—whose entire business revolves around create braindead viral content—want to own the platform most responsible for distributing braindead viral content. Buying TikTok would effectively give him an infotainment monopoly that, for the world’s most powerful influencer, is basically the equivalent of winning the lottery.

The whole reason we’re in this mess to begin with is that, in April, Joe Biden signed a bill which could force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell its app to a US company or face a national ban. Commentators noted what a political disturbance it is, because of how popular TikTok is among young voters. Upon his return to the White House this week, Trump was quick to capitalize on Biden’s unpopular decision. By signing an executive order, Trump passed the TikTok bill a 75-day extension windowby the time ByteDance is allowed to find a suitable buyer, if America can maintain 50 percent ownership of the platform. Trump has already announced that he is open to other famous personalities buying the site—including fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.

There are signs that Trump may support the Donaldson deal, however. Bloomberg reports that Brad Bondi, the brother of Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for Attorney General, represented the investor group behind Donaldson’s push to get the platform. Trump and Bondi have a history together. Bondi was part of the legal team that helped merge the president’s struggling Trump Media & Technology Group Corp (which owns his social media platform, Social Truth) with a blank check company in March, Bloomberg wrote. The agreement was widely viewed as a bailout for Trump when his legal troubles were at their worst. Bondi also previously represented Elon Musk in 2018 when the tech billionaire was accused of securities fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission, The Lever previously reported.

The reason why the US moved so aggressively to ban its children’s favorite social media platform is not fully understood. the dominant narrative US officials are concerned about the platform’s relationship with China and want to cut the connection between the company and its geopolitical enemy. An alternative theory, however, is that TikTok serves as popular vector where pro-Palestinian activists can distribute evidence of Israeli atrocities, thereby turning America’s children against its special ally in the Middle East. Mitt Romney said last year, when he announced that the reason there is “so much support for us to shut down” TikTok is the “so much” number of “mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites.” An op-ed in Time last year similarly blamed more pro-Palestinian content for a rise in anti-Semitic incidents on US college campuses

Since TikTok’s resurgence, rumors have circulated that the platform is now cracking down on pro-Palestinian content. However, these rumors may be exaggerated. An investigation by 404 Media published on Wednesday found that the site appears to be inconsistently suppressing pro-Palestinian content. The site told journalists that the pro-Palestinian content did not violate its terms of service.

If the point of bringing TikTok under US control is, in fact, to stop the flow of pro-Palestinian content to the US audience, there is a certain precedent for this in the behavior of other companies in American technology. A recent report by Human Rights Watch on Meta found that the company practices “systemic censorship of Palestine content on Instagram and Facebook.” X and the YouTube also ran into their own controversies involving Israeli-Palestinian content.