Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Thursday, January 16th.

Today on Forbes, how much is TikTok really worth?

The Supreme Court could rule on a potential TikTok ban in the U.S. as early as Thursday morning.

After justices indicated last week, they were likely to uphold the federal law in question.

The ban would go into effect this Sunday, January 19th, a day before President Trump's

inauguration. Unless President Biden extends the deadline or Congress passes a new bill introduced

earlier this week, they would give the social media app's Chinese parent company BiteDance

another 270 days to divest. Or ByteDance, another 270 days to

divest. Or ByteDance sells the U.S. version of the platform to American owners.

The big question, how much would TikTok cost? TikTok is especially hard to value. There's not only

the question of the prized algorithm, but also the fact that it's currently

a division of a private company based in China. And to complicate things even more, TikTok is technically

a subsidiary of shell companies registered in the financially opaque Cayman Islands, which makes it

nearly impossible for outsiders to know exactly how much revenue, let alone profit,

TikTok makes in the U.S. A forced sale during a temporary ban would likely influence what someone

might pay for TikTok as well. Council for TikTok and Bytance wrote in court documents that a one-month

shutdown could result in a 29% drop in TikTok's global ad revenue for the year.

There are also potential costs associated with a sale.

DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria says, quote,

TikTok would need to create a lot of new infrastructure that it would lose from its parent company in a potential spinoff.

Keeping those complications in mind, here are four potential ways to value TikTok.

Number one, Frank McCourt's $20 billion offer.

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