Vine had over 200 million active users and Twitter didn't see any potential?! TikTok has over 800 monthly active users in 3 years. I don't know what Twitter was thinking but Vine had a lot of potential. TikTok wouldn't be so big if Vine was kept alive and managed well.

Twitter was thinking: “a free video sharing app is crazy expensive.. we’re burning all our capital on an app that will be near impossible to profit from.”

TikTok is as far as I can tell not profitable either, and they’ve been burning hundreds of millions on ads as well. I’m guessing the CCP will gladly spend a few billions to have a social media platform that’s used all over the world.

Is the CCP funding ByteDance? Anyway a quick google suggests they made a tidy 3 billion profit (ByteDance as a whole) https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/tiktok-bytedance-profit.html

Key point is ByteDance as a whole (I haven’t been able to find anything to indicate that TikTok itself is profitable), which happens to be a privately held company. ByteDance’s CEO have also gone on record saying they had a “weak” implementation of Xi Jinping Thought, and promised that ByteDance would “further deepen cooperation” with the Chinese Communist Party to better promote its policies.