Evidence since 2023 shows that TikTok has, in practice, become a major casualty of escalating U.S.–China great power competition, primarily via a forced divestiture rather than an outright ban.

Key developments:

1. Congress targeted TikTok directly with a divestiture-or-ban law. In April 2024, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act was signed into law. It explicitly applies to ByteDance/TikTok and requires apps deemed “foreign adversary controlled” (i.e., TikTok) to either be divested from that control or be banned in the U.S. by January 19, 2025, with only a short possible extension. (en.wikipedia.org) This law is a direct outgrowth of U.S. national security concerns about China.

2. Courts upheld the law, making clear TikTok faced an existential choice. A federal appeals court in late 2024 upheld the constitutionality of the law, confirming that TikTok must complete a qualified divestiture from ByteDance by January 19, 2025, or effectively become unavailable in the U.S. (jurist.org) In early 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court likewise upheld the statute in TikTok, Inc. v. Garland, affirming that Congress could mandate divestiture because of national security risks tied to Chinese ownership. (americanbar.org)

3. The U.S. government repeatedly delayed but did not back off the mandate. After taking office in January 2025, President Trump issued a series of executive orders delaying enforcement of the TikTok ban provisions, not to spare TikTok indefinitely, but explicitly to allow time to negotiate and complete a sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations that would satisfy the statute’s requirements. (whitehouse.gov) The White House framed this as balancing national security with the desire to keep the app online.

4. By late 2025, ByteDance is being forced to relinquish control of TikTok U.S. A September 25, 2025 executive order from President Trump found that a proposed transaction to move TikTok’s U.S. app into a new U.S.-based joint venture constitutes a “qualified divestiture” under the Act, with ByteDance’s stake to be kept under 20% and the algorithm and content moderation controlled by the new U.S. entity under heavy security monitoring. (whitehouse.gov) Reporting in November 2025 describes ByteDance as being in the process of divesting about 80% of its U.S. assets in TikTok to a consortium led by Oracle and Silver Lake, with TikTok’s algorithm to be retrained and supervised under U.S. oversight. (reuters.com)

Interpretation against the prediction:

• The user’s normalized version of the prediction allows "ban, forced divestiture, or equivalent measures" as the mechanism by which TikTok is “severely harmed” and becomes “GPC roadkill.”
• While TikTok as a product remains available in the U.S. as of late 2025, its China-based owner is being compelled by U.S. law and policy—explicitly justified by national security concerns about China—to surrender majority ownership and operational control, including over its core algorithm and data handling. That is a severe strategic and economic blow to ByteDance and to TikTok as a China-controlled asset, and it is precisely the type of outcome one would describe as a major casualty of great power competition.
• The timeline (“over the few years following March 2023”) is also satisfied: the law was passed in April 2024, upheld through 2024–2025, and by late 2025 the forced divestiture framework is in place and being executed.

Because U.S.–China competition has in fact led to a binding legal framework that forces TikTok’s U.S. operations out of effective Chinese control under threat of a nationwide ban, within roughly 2.5 years of the March 2023 podcast, the core substance of Sacks’s prediction—that TikTok would end up as GPC “roadkill” via ban/forced divestiture or equivalent severe measures—is best judged as right rather than wrong or ambiguous.