They are owned by ByteDance, headquartered in Beijing, China.
I didn’t say anything about where they are headquartered. As Martin Armstrong stated in the article, “TikTok is not even available in mainland China as their version is heavily censored. TikTok is a subsidiary of ByteDance, a private company that is not owned by the Chinese government. About 60% of the company is owned by institutional investors, 20% is owned by the founder, and the other 20% is owned by employees. ByteDance has five board members and three of them are American. Their headquarters are in Singapore and Los Angeles, and they have 7,000 employees in the US.”