Amazon's last-second bid to buy TikTok is not being taken seriously
By law, short-form video app TikTok has until this Saturday, April 5th, to be divested by its current owner ByteDance, or else face banishment in the U.S. The legislation requires ByteDance to find a buyer for the popular app that is not a Chinese company. TikTok has been accused of stealing users' personal data, and disseminating propaganda from China and the Chinese Communist Party to U.S. viewers.
It looks like an American company, as American as Apple Pie, has thrown a last-second bid for TikTok into the ring. An unnamed U.S. administration official said today that Amazon has made a bid to acquire TikTok, which had about 1.5 billion monthly active users early this year. Last week, Reuters reported that private equity firm Blackstone was looking at joining a group made up of TikTok's non-Chinese stockholders Susquehanna International Group and General Atlantic to bid for the app.
Another U.S. company believed to be interested in buying TikTok from ByteDance is Oracle. The firm is already involved with TikTok as it is designated as the app's "trusted technology provider" in the U.S. and its servers are used to store the personal data of U.S. TikTok users.
The New York Times reported today that Amazon's bid for TikTok came in the form of a letter sent from the company to Vice President JD Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. However, the Times story says that various parties are not taking Amazon's bid seriously. The value of Amazon's bid as well as those of competing bids are unknown. The online retailer had previously attempted to copy TikTok by launching a similar feature inside its app called Inspire. However, Inspire was considered a failure and was removed from the Amazon app earlier this year.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is reportedly hosting a meeting in the Oval Office on Wednesday to discuss TikTok and the possible suitors for the app. You might recall that in 2020 during Trump's first term, he tried to broker the sale of TikTok to American firms that showed interest including Oracle, Walmart, and Microsoft. This time, there is legislation involved as a bill to ban TikTok in the U.S. was signed by then-President Joe Biden last April.
The bill forced ByteDance to divest its holdings in TikTok by January 19th or get banned in the U.S. President Trump signed an executive order on January 20th, his inauguration day, that prevents the Justice Department from taking action against TikTok until the April 5th deadline.
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