TikTok’s emergence “was just something that was unimaginable,” Snap Inc. SNAP 1.65%▲ Chief Executive Evan Spiegel said last month, as part of an announcement th

TikTok’s emergence “was just something that was unimaginable,” Snap Inc. SNAP 1.65%▲ Chief Executive Evan Spiegel said last month, as part of an announcement that his company would be slashing jobs. “No startup could afford to invest billions and billions and billions of dollars in user acquisition like that around the world.” The report shows a company rapidly increasing its revenues, accumulating a massive war chest of cash and other investments, but with net results weighed down by tens of billions of dollars in unrealized market losses on convertible securities. Largely because of the accounting treatment of those securities, ByteDance’s net loss widened by more than 87% to $84.9 billion in 2021, according to the report. Despite the rising expenses, ByteDance has managed to increase its cash and cash equivalents, which sat at $42.6 billion at the end of March, up from $34.1 billion at the end of 2021. Its total assets were at $74 billion in March, up from $64.3 billion in December. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics.