Trump’s Bidding War & Talks With Microsoft to buy TikTok

According to US President Donald Trump, Microsoft is negotiating to buy TikTok, and he wants to see a “bidding war” over the social media app’s sale.

The US president says he wants to see a bidding war for an app that has been the subject of national security worries and is owned by China’s ByteDance.

Trump said, “I would say yes” when reporters asked if the US tech giant was getting ready to make an offer. He then said that “great interest in TikTok” was being shown by a number of firms.

Following the US president’s remarks to reporters on board Air Force One on Monday, Reuters reached out to Microsoft, TikTok, and ByteDance for comment, but all three did not immediately react.

For years, both Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden have attempted to get ByteDance, the Chinese parent firm of TikTok, to sell its US operations on the basis of national security. And according to reports, Microsoft is considering acquiring TikTok for the second time. Citing national security concerns for Microsoft and ByteDance, Trump ordered TikTok to split its US version from ByteDance during his first administration.

In 2020, Microsoft was the leading bidder, but the negotiations quickly broke down, and Trump’s divestment campaign came to an end a few months after he left office.

Last week, Trump issued an executive order to postpone a ban on TikTok imposed by the Biden Administration, which momentarily shut down the service this month in anticipation of a regulation that would have forced its Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app on national security grounds or risk a ban that would have gone into effect on January 19th for its 170 million US users.

Following his inauguration on January 20, Trump issued an executive order attempting to postpone the implementation of the law.

Trump was the first to begin pressing ByteDance to sell its app, even though he had given TikTok a 75-day respite from the ban and he stated last week that he was in discussions with many parties over the purchase of TikTok and will likely make a decision regarding the future of the well-known app within 30 days.

If Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to purchase the social networking app, the US president has already stated that he was amenable to the idea. Musk hasn’t, however, addressed Trump’s proposition in public.

The US company’s CEO later called ByteDance’s approach to Microsoft as a potential acquisition “the strangest thing” when it was made in August 2020.

Later on, TikTok selected competitor Oracle as a possible partner, but that agreement also fell through.

According to a source who spoke to Reuters on Sunday, Perplexity AI, an AI firm, proposed to merge with TikTok, with the US government eventually owning up to half of the combined business.

As previously said, Trump is expected to make a decision about the future of TikTok over the next 30 days after discussing the app’s acquisition with other stakeholders.

The TikTok conversations were referred to as the “strangest thing I’ve ever worked on” by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in 2021. He went further to say that the US government had a “specific set of requirements and then it just disappeared.”

Microsoft was claimed to have “nothing to share at this time” by a Microsoft representative. TikTok has also been contacted by the BBC for comment.

The US president had discussed the planned sale of TikTok earlier on Monday when speaking to a group of Republican legislators in Florida.

“We’ll observe the situation. There will be a large number of bidders,” he said.

“If we can save all that voice and all the jobs, and China won’t be involved, we don’t want China involved, but we’ll see what happens,” he stated.

Former names associated with purchasing TikTok include Canadian entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary, a celebrity investor on Shark Tank, the US equivalent of Dragon’s Den, and millionaire Frank McCourt.

The world’s largest YouTuber, Jimmy Donaldson, popularly known as MrBeast, has stated that he is in the race after many investors reached out to him after he expressed interest in his previous tweet.