Amazon has put in a bid to buy TikTok, a Trump administration official mentioned Wednesday, in an eleventh-hour pitch as a U.S. ban on the platform is about to enter impact Saturday.
The official, who was not licensed to remark publicly and spoke on the situation of anonymity, mentioned the Amazon supply was made in a letter to Vice President JD Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The New York Occasions first reported on the bid.
President Donald Trump on Inauguration Day gave the platform a reprieve, barreling previous a legislation that had been upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court docket, which mentioned the ban was mandatory for nationwide safety.
Underneath the legislation, TikTok’s Chinese language-owned father or mother firm ByteDance is required to promote the platform to an accredited purchaser or take it offline in america. Trump has recommended he might additional prolong the pause on the ban, however he has additionally mentioned he expects a deal to be cast by Saturday.
Amazon declined to remark. TikTok didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
The existence of an Amazon bid surfaced as Trump was scheduled on Wednesday to satisfy with senior officers to debate the approaching deadline for a TikTok sale.
Though it’s unclear if ByteDance plans to promote TikTok, a number of attainable bidders have come ahead up to now few months. Among the many attainable buyers are the software program firm Oracle and the funding agency Blackstone. Oracle introduced in 2020 that it had a 12.5% stake in TikTok World after securing its enterprise because the app’s cloud know-how supplier.
In January, the synthetic intelligence startup Perplexity AI offered ByteDance with a merger proposal that will mix Perplexity’s enterprise with TikTok’s U.S. operation. Final month, the corporate outlined its strategy to rebuilding TikTok in a weblog submit, arguing that it’s “singularly positioned to rebuild the TikTok algorithm without creating a monopoly.”
“Any acquisition by a consortium of investors could in effect keep ByteDance in control of the algorithm, while any acquisition by a competitor would likely create a monopoly in the short form video and information space,” Perplexity mentioned in its submit.
The corporate mentioned it will remake the TikTok algorithm and be sure that infrastructure could be developed and maintained in “American data centers with American oversight, ensuring alignment with domestic privacy standards and regulations.”
Different potential bidders embody a consortium organized by billionaire businessman Frank McCourt, which not too long ago recruited Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian as a strategic adviser. Buyers within the consortium say they’ve supplied ByteDance $20 billion in money for TikTok’s U.S. platform. Jesse Tinsley, the founding father of the payroll agency Employer.com, says he too has organized a consortium and is providing ByteDance greater than $30 billion for the platform. Wyoming small enterprise proprietor Reid Rasner has additionally introduced that he supplied ByteDance roughly $47.5 billion.
Each the FBI and the Federal Communications Fee have warned that ByteDance might share consumer information — comparable to shopping historical past, location and biometric identifiers — with China’s authoritarian authorities. TikTok mentioned it has by no means achieved that and wouldn’t achieve this if requested. The U.S. authorities has not offered proof of that taking place.
Trump has hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and has credited the trendsetting platform with serving to him acquire traction amongst younger voters.
Throughout his first time period, he took a extra skeptical view of TikTok and issued govt orders banning dealings with ByteDance in addition to the homeowners of the Chinese language messaging app WeChat.
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
