Who Gets the TikTok in the Divorce? The Messy Fight Over Valuable Social Media Accounts

When Kat and Mike Stickler filed for divorce, their lawyers had a math problem.

Among the couple’s biggest assets was MikeAndKat, a channel on TikTok and YouTube in which they shared their lives with about four million followers. No one knew how to evenly split MikeAndKat between Mike and Kat.

“The judge was like, ‘what?’” Kat said last month during a podcast interview with Northwestern Mutual. “It’s a whole new terrain.”

Social media pays the bills for millions of Americans. But making a living online is more financially complicated than working a 9-to-5. Influencers need an audience to win advertising deals, and changing what they post risks turning followers away. Couples who showcase their love life online face an existential threat to the family business when they split.

For the lawyers charged with pinning a dollar value to the accounts to divide them fairly, it’s way harder than assessing a house or car. Fortunes can swing depending on which ex has the keys to the account. That was Kat’s argument in fighting for control of the TikTok channel.

“If the TikTok account was left to me, it would keep growing, but if it wasn’t, it would stop,” said Kat, 29, in the podcast interview.

She was right.

Kat got the TikTok, changed that handle to KatStickler and now has almost 10.5 million followers. She has another three million across Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. The channels, where Kat posts skits impersonating her mother and snippets of her everyday life, have earned her enough to buy a condo and become a small business investor.

Mike ended up with the YouTube account, which is now defunct. He now works in sales and declined to comment.

There are 27 million paid content creators in the U.S., and 44% of them say social media is their full-time job, consultant The Keller Advisory Group found.

The big bucks don’t come from views or followers. Brands pay influencers to recommend a product or service to their audience. U.S. advertisers paid content creators $26 billion in 2023, according to Statista.

Once divorce specialists tally up how much money the accounts are raking in, the couple can divide them, or one partner can take more and buy out the other.

But there’s one elusive factor in a digital asset’s value: the account’s potential to keep making money. Both partners have to make a case for their role in that potential. How many pranks did they think of? How many hours did they spend editing videos?

“There’s typically one person in the relationship who is passionate about social media, who’s driving the business,” says Cameron Ajdari, who runs a talent management group with his wife representing some of TikTok’s most followed couples.

It’s not always clear who that person is by the time divorce rolls around. Social media success often evolves quickly, and couples may not be prepared to track finances and labour.

Reza and Puja Khan say everything they’ve done to amass about five million followers on shared channels has been a team effort. They started posting about their wedding in 2020 and, within months, Puja was able to quit her office job. Now, they estimate social media brings in about half a million dollars a year.

Almost all of that goes into a joint bank account. It was a little overwhelming to see their incomes jump so fast, far above what their parents made, say Reza, 28, and Puja, 27. They hired a financial adviser earlier this year, but the idea of dividing their empire has never crossed Puja’s mind.

“This is the first time we’re actually thinking about it,” she says. “If I really went public with a hypothetical split, that could create its own momentum.”

The way influencers rebuild their brands after breaking up can make or break their careers.

If the person got popular by posting memes or makeup tutorials, they probably won’t take much of a financial hit from a divorce. But there could be more damage if a lot of the videos feature family time.

“One could take it over and they just rebrand, which is risky,” says Nina Shayan Depatie, a divorce attorney in Los Angeles who has worked with influencers. “When you’re looking at the valuation, you would have to consider that.”

Ayumi Lashley, 34, started creating social media videos with her husband in 2017. They made it their full-time job in 2020 and the accounts paid for her car and house, she says.

When they divorced in 2023, they both tried to elevate their personal profiles, but their fan base is still attached to a nonexistent relationship. She says she chose not to share much about the split and lost a few thousand followers, while her ex posted more about the divorce.

“A lot of people were very upset with me for not talking about it,” Lashley says. “His career is doing amazing and mine is not.”

Many content creators don’t intend to make videos of their daily outfits forever, even if it isn’t divorce that ends their careers.

“I always joke we’re like NFL players. You get five or 10 good years, but you take one bad hit to the knee and you’re done,” says Vivian Tu, 30, who posts about financial literacy to roughly eight million followers. “You can’t control the algorithms. You can’t control what is in vogue and what’s not.”

Tu says she is preparing for a life away from social media by developing other streams of income, including writing a book and hosting a podcast.

She is also aware of what divorce could do to her business. Tu wrote up a prenuptial agreement that included all her social-media accounts before she got married in June.

“My social media is my résumé,” Tu says. “Why would I allow anybody else to put my work on their résumé?”

Former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu delivered a warning to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a recent visit to Washington: Already-high airfares will surge if the war in Iran doesn’t end soon.

Sununu, a Republican who represents some of the biggest airlines as president of the industry group Airlines for America, has for weeks sounded the alarm to Trump administration officials about the economic fallout from high jet fuel prices. The war, Sununu has argued, must come to a close soon, or things will get worse.

Administration officials have gotten the message.

Privately, President Trump’s advisers are increasingly worried that Republicans will pay a political price for the rising fuel costs, according to people familiar with the matter. Many of those advisers are eager to end the war, hoping prices will begin to moderate before November’s midterm elections.

The fallout from the U.S.-Israeli attack in late February has slowed traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane, triggering a sharp increase in oil, gasoline and jet-fuel prices.

That means consumers are grappling with high costs ahead of the summer travel season, as they consider vacation plans.

Sixty-three per cent of Americans said they put a great deal or a good amount of blame on Trump for the increase in gas prices, according to a new poll conducted by NPR, PBS and Marist.

More than 8 in 10 Americans said struggles at the gas pump are putting strain on their finances.

Jet-fuel prices roughly doubled in a matter of weeks after the war began, and they have remained high. Airlines have said that will add billions of dollars of additional expenses this year, squeezing profit margins.

U.S. airlines spent more than $5 billion on fuel in March—up 30% from a year earlier, according to government data.

Carriers have been raising ticket prices, hoping to pass the cost along to consumers, and they are culling flights that will no longer make money at higher price levels.

In March, the price of a U.S. domestic round-trip economy ticket rose 21% from a year earlier to $570, according to Airlines Reporting Corp., which tracks travel-agency sales.

So far, airlines have said the higher fares haven’t deterred bookings and they are hoping to recoup more of the fuel-cost increases as the year goes on.

Earlier this week, Trump said the current price of oil is “a very small price to pay for getting rid of a nuclear weapon from people that are really mentally deranged.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that if Iran got a nuclear weapon, the country would have more leverage to keep the strait closed and “make our gas prices like $9 a gallon or $8 a gallon.”

Trump has taken steps in recent days to bring the war to an end. Late Tuesday, the president paused a plan to help guide trapped commercial ships out of the Strait of Hormuz, expressing optimism that a deal could be reached with Iran to end the conflict.

Crude oil prices fell below $100 a barrel on Wednesday, after reports that Iran and the U.S. are working with mediators on a one-page framework to restart negotiations aimed at ending the conflict and opening the strait.

Sununu said Trump administration officials are conscious of the economic fallout from the war: “They get it…and I think that’s why they’re trying to get through the war as fast as they can.”

But he cautioned that it could take months for prices to return to prewar levels.

“Ticket prices won’t go down immediately” after the strait is fully reopened, Sununu said. “You’re looking at elevated ticket prices through the summer and fall because it takes a while for the prices to go down.”

Since the initial U.S.-Israeli attack in late February, Sununu has met in Washington with National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, representatives from the Transportation Department and senior White House officials.

A White House official confirmed that Hassett and Sununu have discussed the effect of increased fuel prices on the airline industry. The official said the conversation touched on how the industry can mitigate the impact of high jet fuel prices on consumers.

“The president and his entire energy team anticipated these short-term disruptions to the global energy markets from Operation Epic Fury and had a plan prepared to mitigate these disruptions,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said, pointing to the administration’s decision to waive a century-old shipping law in a bid to lower the cost of moving oil.

Rogers said the administration is working with industry representatives to “address their concerns, explore potential actions, and inform the president’s policy decisions.”

A Treasury Department spokesman pointed to Bessent’s recent comments on Fox News that the U.S. economy remains strong despite price increases. The spokesman said Treasury officials have met with airline executives, who have reaffirmed strong ticket bookings.

“We’re cognizant that this short-term move up in prices is affecting the American people, but I am also confident, on the other side of this, prices will come down very quickly,” Bessent told Fox News on Monday.

The war has already contributed to one casualty in the industry: Spirit Airlines. Company representatives have said they were forced to close the airline because the sustained surge in jet-fuel prices derailed the company’s plan to emerge from chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The Trump administration and Spirit failed to come to an agreement for the company to receive a financial lifeline of as much as $500 million from the federal government.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has argued that the Iran war wasn’t the cause of Spirit’s demise, pointing to the company’s past financial struggles, as well as the Biden administration’s decision to challenge a merger with JetBlue.

Other budget airlines have also turned to the federal government for help since the U.S.-Israeli attack. A group of budget airlines last month sought $2.5 billion in financial assistance to offset higher fuel costs, and they separately wrote to lawmakers asking for relief from certain ticket taxes.

Who Gets the TikTok in the Divorce? The Messy Fight Over Valuable Social Media Accounts

When couples who make their living online split up, assessing the accounts’ future value and divvying them up fairly is a drag

Administration officials have spoken to the airline industry, which has voiced concerns about the rising costs.