WASHINGTON — Amazon has put in a bid to buy TikTok, a Trump administration official stated Wednesday, in an eleventh-hour pitch as a U.S. ban on the platform is ready to enter impact Saturday.
The official, who was not licensed to remark publicly and spoke on the situation of anonymity, stated the Amazon provide was made in a letter to Vice President JD Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The New York Instances first reported on the bid.
President Donald Trump on Inauguration Day gave the platform a reprieve, barreling previous a regulation that had been upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court docket, which stated the ban was needed for nationwide safety.
Underneath the regulation, TikTok’s Chinese language-owned mother or father firm ByteDance is required to promote the platform to an permitted purchaser or take it offline in the USA. Trump has advised he might additional lengthen the pause on the ban, however he has additionally stated 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 fulfill 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 prior 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 International after securing its enterprise because the app’s cloud know-how supplier.
In January, the factitious 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 method to rebuilding TikTok in a weblog publish, 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 stated in its publish.
The corporate stated it will remake the TikTok algorithm and make 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 embrace a consortium organized by billionaire businessman Frank McCourt, which lately recruited Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian as a strategic adviser. Traders within the consortium say they’ve provided 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 provided ByteDance roughly $47.5 billion.
Each the FBI and the Federal Communications Fee have warned that ByteDance might share person information — equivalent to looking historical past, location and biometric identifiers — with China’s authoritarian authorities. TikTok stated it has by no means carried out that and wouldn’t accomplish that if requested. The U.S. authorities has not offered proof of that occuring.
Trump has thousands and thousands of followers on TikTok and has credited the trendsetting platform with serving to him achieve 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 house owners of the Chinese language messaging app WeChat.
