TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer Walks Out on His Co-Workers

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 27, 7:54AM EDT

TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer Walks Out on His Co-Workers — © Thinkstock

According to several media reports, TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer has walked out on his co-workers. A former senior executive of Walt Disney, he had been head of TikTok for three months. It is a division of China’s ByteDance. President Trump has threatened to shutter TikTok in the United States if it is not sold by 45 days from when that threat was made on August 6. The accusation against TikTok is that it could pass along data from U.S. users to Chinese interests, which makes it a security risk. Mayer could have at the very least stayed until a final decision was made about the future.
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The note Mayer wrote to explain his decision read:

I understand that the role that I signed up for—including running TikTok globally—will look very different as a result of the U.S. administration’s action to push for a selloff of the U.S. business. I’ve always been globally focused in my work, and leading a global team that includes TikTok U.S. was a big draw for me.

Put another way, he did not want to run a smaller company. His ambitions overrode any commitment he had to the people who worked for him.
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Mayer is not the kind of executive any company should want at its head. He left Disney when he was passed over for the CEO job. The TikTok job was a chance to run a rapidly growing company that had become what many believed was in the vanguard of social media.

Mayer must have had a major say in the decision by TikTok to sue the White House as a means to block the decision to ban it. Even so, he did not wait out the ruling on the legal action. Essentially, he decided to let this decision and his responsibility to the company and its people go.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.