Meet the 'reclusive' tech billionaire making an audacious bid to buy TikTok

Business Insider

06-06-2025

AppLovin is in the mix to buy TikTok and save the vertical video app from a US ban.
Adam Foroughi, AppLovin's founder, is an uncharacteristically low-key tech billionaire.
Foroughi's getting used to the spotlight as the $100 billion-plus company makes its biggest bet yet.
Adam Foroughi tends to eschew the typical trappings of a billionaire.
He has one car, and would rather it were self-driving. He rarely appears on TV or conference stages. In his downtime, you're more likely to find him at home with his five children than schmoozing on the slopes of Davos. People who know him point to his mild manner and lack of ego.
His advertising technology company, AppLovin, is similarly unflashy. With an ad network that reaches around a billion daily users and a market cap more than twice that of Snap, Pinterest, and Reddit combined, it was the technology behemoth you'd never heard of.
"We're a $100 billion-plus company, not many people know of us, so that's probably a flaw on me," Foroughi told Business Insider in an interview.
Then came April.
Ahead of a June 19 deadline, AppLovin and Foroughi, 45, made a last-minute bid to acquire the international assets of TikTok as the Chinese-owned company faces a potential ban in the US.
It's an audacious move for any company, let alone one with a founder who usually goes out of his way to avoid the spotlight.
It faces an uphill battle. Competition is fierce. President Donald Trump has said he's been negotiating with multiple potential buyers. Investors like Kevin O'Leary of "Shark Tank" fame and former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt have signaled interest, and other tech companies are in the mix.
At AppLovin, Foroughi is known for running a ruthlessly efficient ship that drives hard for profit. It's not unusual for the company to reduce head count even when it's doing well. Foroughi executes with a hands-on management style that has, at times, seen him struggle to delegate to execs who don't fit the mold. And the company's recent financial success has also caught the attention of short sellers who have raised questions about its data practices.
With TikTok, Foroughi would be taking on an organization with a much bigger spotlight — and the heat that comes from running a user-generated content business popular among teens and often lambasted by parents.
Most of the former AppLovin employees, competitors, and business associates who spoke with BI believe he's up to the task. They say Foroughi's smarts, as well as his tendency to forgo the marketing jazz hands and let the product do the talking, position him well to crank up the dial for TikTok's ad business.
"We've been competing for over a decade, and I've never seen anyone like him — he's all around amazing, it hurts me to say it," said an executive at one of AppLovin's competitors. "He's the most talented CEO I have ever seen."
Foroughi acknowledged that the TikTok bid is uncharted territory for him, but "I don't really care about 'uncomfortable,'" he said. "I do what I think is right for my business."
An Iranian export
Foroughi and his family fled Iran when he was four years old, in the fallout of the Iranian Revolution.
They settled in Laguna Beach, California. His father, once one of Iran's leading real estate developers, left nearly all his wealth behind, and the family had to adjust to a more frugal lifestyle, a new culture, and a different language.
"My parents had to give up a lot to get us over here," Foroughi said. "Knowing that, you always have this motivation inside you to perform."
After graduating with a degree in finance from the University of California, Berkeley, Foroughi took a job as a derivatives trader. He found it a lonely existence. He wanted to build something of his own, and he wanted to work with people.
He worked at a marketing agency for small businesses, which later morphed into a social media marketing company. Eventually, as the app stores of Apple and Google became dominant, he looked to apps.
With a small team of engineers in Palo Alto, Foroughi created a fashion app, then a dating app.
"They stunk," Foroughi said. "We got rid of them."
In 2012, they launched their third attempt — an app that allowed friends to connect and send recommendations for other apps to download. This one stuck. If you were playing "Words with Friends," the app could send a push notification to your contacts, asking them to join. AppLovin was born.
Like many tech companies, AppLovin — which Foroughi insists wasn't inspired by McLovin, the nerdy character in the stoner film "Superbad" — decided to pivot to advertising. It expanded from a ground-floor garage to offices on three continents, and more than 1,500 employees as of December 2024, and a market capitalization of $140 billion at the time of publication.
The business model is fairly simple: It helps app developers make money and find users using in-app ads. But under the surface is a highly optimized AI-powered algorithm designed to entice businesses with the promise that chucking $1 into the machine will net $2, $5, or $10 in profit.
It's a snug fit for TikTok, where ads for figure-hugging jeans, grip socks for soccer, and campaigns for major brands like Coca-Cola and Apple are slotted between consumable vertical videos. While TikTok has soared in popularity, particularly among Gen Z, its ad revenue lags behind Google, Meta, and Amazon. AppLovin thinks its adtech can help close the gap.
AppLovin has also widened its aperture beyond its core gaming roots in recent months. After it opened up its ad platform to e-commerce advertisers, some said that they were excited for an alternative to Meta, which had become increasingly expensive in their hunt for new customers. Mike True, CEO of the e-commerce marketing platform Prescient AI, said AppLovin is the fourth most invested-in channel among its advertiser clients, behind Meta, Google, and Amazon Ads.
"The fact that advertisers continue to invest in AppLovin, even amid a cautious market, suggests growing confidence in its long-term role within the performance stack," True said.
Last year, the company posted net income of $1.58 billion at 34% margins — a margin profile almost on a par with Meta, and ahead of its closest adtech rival, The Trade Desk, which had a profit margin of 16% in 2024. AppLovin's annual revenue rose 43% to $4.7 billion.
But some observers said that while AppLovin helped e-commerce advertisers extract more sales from current customers, it was less effective in driving sales from new ones. Jones Road Beauty was one of AppLovin's early e-commerce clients, but its CEO, Cody Plofker, told BI it's no longer using AppLovin.
"We found it not to be very incremental with new customers," Plofker said.
Foroughi said that the e-commerce product is still in its infancy and doesn't yet work for everyone.
"But it will as we build it out," he added.
AppLovin' it
One Silicon Valley tech veteran who interacted with AppLovin in the early years said taking meetings with Foroughi was a "breath of fresh air." He cut to the chase, no two-martini lunches necessary.
"We got on calls and he'd be very to the point, versus the mindset where relationships precede business — a very Valley kind of guy," the person said.
Simon Spaull was AppLovin's first hire in Europe in 2014. He reluctantly entertained the idea at first.
"No one had heard of it and it was a rubbish name," Spaull said.
He was soon convinced. Spaull stayed at the company for almost seven years, as it continuously posted record annual revenue, mostly growing traction through word of mouth in the gaming community.
Foroughi has remained deeply enmeshed with day-to-day operations, including customer service. Up until around a year ago, he ran product and human resources alongside his CEO role. (He said he wanted to "get more involved in making sure our culture is aligned with the principles we had when we started the business.") When he's not traveling, he sits among the engineers.
"You don't know what's going on in your business if you don't work with your employees," Foroughi said.
Foroughi has said some of the biggest mistakes he made as CEO involved taking outside advice, including briefly hiring a chief operating officer in 2012.
"I thought, what's the point of me at this company, I'm hands-on, I'm not going to defer to this hire," Foroughi said at a recent conference held by the investment bank Jefferies.
He had a similar reaction after following advice to bring on a chief revenue officer and a brand ad sales team, with staffers who were paid more than the company's best engineer, the person making the actual product.
"It bugged the crap out of me," Foroughi said. He scrapped the entire team.
The company's strategy has been defined in part by unrelenting efficiency. Foroughi, who said he considers Elon Musk as an inspiration, counts EBITDA — or profit — per employee as one of his most important success metrics.
The company recently sold off its entire mobile gaming studio business — developers of hit games like "Mobile Strike" and "Project Makeover" — deeming it surplus after the apps had been sucked for data to use for its advertising algorithms.
Foroughi also showed a cut-throat streak in 2022, when the gaming software development company Unity announced its intention to acquire AppLovin's app advertising rival, IronSource. Seeking to derail the merger, AppLovin put in an unsolicited $20 billion bid to merge with Unity, but only on the provision that Unity drop the IronSource deal. Rather than make his offer to Unity's management team and the board, Foroughi went public to appeal directly to Unity's main shareholders: the investment firms Sequoia and Silver Lake.
Unity's management team wasn't happy, and they rejected the hostile takeover bid.
Foroughi has no regrets.
"The only way to disrupt that deal" was for AppLovin to make its takeover offer public, Foroughi said. "Yes, it was a little uncomfortable, obviously."
Those within Foroughi's orbit say the billionaire has a generous side.
A banker who worked on AppLovin's 2021 initial public offering recalled receiving an updated draft of the registration statement and noticing that Foroughi had recently sold off around $10 million of stock, at a low price, pre-IPO. He asked Foroughi why.
"He's like, 'Uh, I'm surprised you found that. Yes, I sold some stock back to the company to distribute it to the team that was under-equitized," the person said.
A busted China tie-up and the attack of the short sellers
The TikTok suitor is no stranger to US-China tensions. In 2016, Foroughi signed a deal with a Chinese private-equity firm that valued AppLovin at $1.4 billion, and would provide a $1 billion cash injection. The deal was blocked by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States on national security grounds.
"CFIUS saved my ass," Foroughi said at the Jefferies Private Growth Conference earlier this year, referring to AppLovin's financial performance since.
The company's methods have been called into question in recent months with four short-seller reports, published in quick succession.
The most high-profile, from Carson Block's Muddy Waters Research, said AppLovin was "impermissibly extracting" data from top apps like Meta, Google, and TikTok, and targeting ads at "high value users" without their consent. The report also said AppLovin was using underhanded techniques to claim credit for sales it didn't generate.
In an email to BI, Block said that Muddy Waters believed Foroughi "lied" in a March blog post, when he pushed back on the idea that the company "uses persistent user identifiers without their consent." Persistent identifiers follow users across different websites and devices, and it can be difficult for users to delete them or even know they exist. Muddy Waters said AppLovin's use of these IDs violates various platforms' terms of service and privacy laws in some jurisdictions.
Block also said that Foroughi's background pre-AppLovin "supports our opinion that he should not be trusted." He was referring to Foroughi's tenure at a company called Claria, which owned a controversial eWallet software called Gator, that was said at the time to have distributed "adware" that collected users' browsing habits, and bombarded them with pop-up ads. One of Foroughi's early ad networks, SocialHour, was removed from Facebook in 2009 for violating its platform policies.
Foroughi has previously said in blog posts that the short-seller reports were "littered with inaccuracies and false assertions" and were aimed at driving down AppLovin's share price for their own financial gain. He told BI that he worked at Claria for a few months as a 25-year-old. In response to questions about SocialHour, he said all companies that monetized Facebook's inventory were removed when Facebook brought monetization in-house.
Some industry insiders saw the reports as confirmation of their bafflement at AppLovin's success, particularly in light of its reliance on mobile games, which are not always highly valued by big brands and agencies.
In the running for TikTok
AppLovin has proposed merging its company with all of TikTok's international business — not just TikTok US. Foroughi describes this as an "enhancement" to Oracle, which is TikTok's cloud provider in the US. Under AppLovin's proposal, Oracle would still provide data storage and security. Oracle didn't respond to requests for comment.
AppLovin has also pitched itself as a salve for TikTok's woes.
"There are really big national security and data issues, and I think we could solve them," Foroughi told BI.
AppLovin says it has expertise in both handling user data and controlling complex algorithms, which it believes could help it remove biases from TikTok's content recommendation system.
"I see what folks in the administration are doing now, what someone like Elon has sacrificed to give back to the country, and I think we could play a small part here," Foroughi said in an interview that took place before Musk and Trump's spectacular falling out this week.
TikTok didn't respond to a request for comment.
Ari Paparo, a former Googler and adtech exec who now runs the marketing media company Marketecture, said AppLovin has some big advantages in its TikTok bid: Its monster market capitalization makes the financial side feasible, it has proven monetization capabilities that could make ads on TikTok better, and it isn't "Big Tech," which has drawn antitrust scrutiny.
On the other hand, he said, "The company is a bit of an unknown in DC."
That may soon change. In April, Foroughi was spotted at the launch party of Donald Trump Jr.'s private members club.
"​​I'm reclusive by design, so part of the challenge has been that I have to get out there, and get to be known, and I just wasn't before this," Foroughi said.