Microsoft is in discussion to buy TikTok for a purported price of $100 billion (£80bn), US President Donald Trump revealed in a conversation with reporters yesterday. Microsoft has declined to comment.
Last year, President Joe Biden signed a bill that pledged to outlaw TikTok in the United States — leaving 170 million Americans without access to the immensely popular social media app — if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, failed to divest the US operation of this popular video-sharing app.
When the deadline passed earlier this month, TikTok went offline for millions across the US and pushed thousands to switch to a little-known Chinese alternative, called REDnote. Following his inauguration, President Donald Trump granted ByteDance an additional 75 days to sell its US operations.
Donald Trump's White House is currently negotiating a deal that would allow TikTok’s China-based owner, ByteDance, to retain a minority stake in the company. However, a US company would be responsible for overseeing the all-important algorithm, data collection practices, and software updates, NPR reports.
"The goal is for Oracle to effectively monitor and provide oversight with what is going on with TikTok," a person involved in the talks revealed to NPR on condition of anonymity. "ByteDance would not completely go away, but it would minimise Chinese ownership."
No matter which US company becomes the primary stakeholder in TikTok, it appears some variation of the structure above would be imposed by the government to ensure that data collection and software updates as closely monitored to avoid interference from the ruling party in China.
According to President Trump, Microsoft has entered the race to become a majority stakeholder in the social media app.
Best known for its Office 365 suite of applications, Xbox gaming division, and of course, its Windows desktop operating system, Microsoft actually already owns one social network — LinkedIn, which it acquired for $26.2 billion (£20bn) in June 2016.
This isn't the first time Microsoft has looked into acquiring TikTok.
The Redmond-based company emerged as a top bidder in 2020 during the first Donald Trump presidency. However, acquisition talks collapsed and the divestment push ended a few months later when Trump left office.
Speaking one year after the deal fell apart, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described the deal as the "strangest thing I've ever worked on." According to the high-profile executive, the United States government had a "particular set of requirements and then it just disappeared."
Microsoft isn't the only company interested in making a bid for TikTok, which has become incredibly popular and influential with younger social media users.
Donald Trump has previously stated that he was open to Elon Muskthat he was open to Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire owner of X, formerly Twitter, buying the social media app if he wanted to.
However, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Musk has not publicly commented on Trump's offer.
Oracle chairman Larry Ellison spoke at the announcement of The Stargate Project, an ambitious $500 billion bet on Artificial Intelligence (AI) spearheaded by Donald Trump, earlier this month
REUTERS
Other players believed to be in the running for the US operations of the video-sharing platform are software company Oracle, billionaire investor Frank McCourt, and YouTube megastar Mr.Beast.
Oracle already has a relationship with TikTok, since it's the primary provider of its servers — managing the portfolio of data centres where billions of short-form videos are stored and streamed. Last year, Oracle warned that a total TikTok ban in the US would damage its business.
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Like many Chinese corporations, ByteDance has an internal Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committee, which sees Vice President Zhang Fuping serving as ByteDance's CCP Committee Secretary.
TikTok says it never stores US user information on servers in China. However, the video-sharing platform does collect information on its users to learn their tastes and suggest relevant clips.
Of course, TikTok is not alone — dozens of other companies, such as Meta-owned Facebook collect, store and share users' data, but US lawmakers have never treated that activity as a national security threat.
