- President Trump said he “would say yes” to Microsoft buying TikTok but maintained that there are many interested parties that will be bidding to buy the app before a 75-day extension to decide its fate expires in April.
As Trump’s 75-day extension to either ban or sell TikTok quickly runs out, the president said the fate of the app should be decided the old-fashioned way: with a bidding war.
Trump said that several potential suitors were in talks to buy TikTok, and he signaled that a decision on the app’s future could be made in the next 30 days. While Trump gave TikTok parent company ByteDance a 75-day reprieve from having to either sell its U.S. assets or face a ban in the country, that extension expires in April.
“We’ll see what happens. We’re going to have a lot of people bidding on it,” he said, according to the BBC.
“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 reportedly added.
While it’s unclear which bidder will ultimately succeed in acquiring TikTok, the company has attracted no shortage of interest from marquee names, such as a team of investors including billionaire Frank McCourt and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary, as well as YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, known online as “MrBeast.”
Yet Trump signaled that despite the existing bids, he “would say yes” to a familiar Big Tech name: Microsoft.
A spokesperson for Microsoft said the company had “nothing more to share” on the subject of a potential TikTok acquisition.
Microsoft first explored the idea of buying TikTok for tens of billions of dollars in 2020 during Trump’s initial term in office after he tried to get the social media app banned.
Back then, Trump was on board with Microsoft’s bid, saying, “I don’t mind if, whether it is Microsoft or somebody else, a big company, a secure company, very American company buy it.”
Yet days before a Sept. 15, 2020, deadline Trump set at the time, Microsoft announced its bid had been rejected. CEO Satya Nadella later called the potential TikTok deal “the strangest thing” he’d ever worked on.
Despite Trump’s stated approval of Microsoft’s interest, NPR reported that the White House was in talks with Oracle (who was also in discussions in 2020) and a group of U.S. investors to take over the app’s global operations.
It is yet to be seen whether a sale will go forward, and if the Chinese government will approve. General Atlantic CEO Bill Ford, who also sits on ByteDance’s board, said that he was still confident that the Trump administration could help facilitate a deal that wouldn’t require a sale.
“Our focus is finding a solution that allows TikTok to operate as a stand-alone business, as it has already, and we think there is a solution to that,” Ford told CNBC.
