The Times added its sources said the parties involved in the talks did not appear to be taking Amazon’s bid seriously.
According to reports, the most likely solution would see existing US investors in ByteDance roll over their stakes into a new independent global TikTok company.
Additional US investors, including Oracle and Blackstone, the private equity firm, would be brought on to reduce the proportion of Chinese investors.
Much of TikTok’s US activity is already housed on Oracle servers, and the company’s chairman, Larry Ellison, is a long-time Trump ally.
The hugely popular video-sharing app, which has over 170 million American users, is under threat from a law that passed overwhelmingly last year and orders TikTok to split from its Chinese owner ByteDance or face a ban in the United States.
Motivated by widespread belief in Washington that TikTok is ultimately controlled by the Chinese Government, the law took effect on January 19, one day before Trump’s inauguration.
The Republican President quickly announced a delay that has allowed it to continue to operate. That delay is set to expire on April 5.
“We have a lot of people that want to buy TikTok,” Trump told reporters on board Air Force One recently.
Any deal to divest TikTok from ByteDance will require the approval of Beijing, and Trump has said he may offer to reduce tariffs on China as a way to get Beijing’s approval for the sale.
Trump, though he supported a ban in his first term, has lately become the app’s greatest defender, seeing it as a reason more young voters supported him in November’s election.
The line-up of bidders includes an initiative called The People’s Bid for TikTok, launched by real estate and sports tycoon Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty initiative.
Others in the running are artificial intelligence start-up Perplexity and a group that includes internet personality MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson.
Former President Joe Biden signed a sale-or-ban law in April 2024 – that had passed Congress with bipartisan support following a confidential security briefing (the Senate vote was 79 to 18, the House of Representatives 360 to 58).
The ban was due to come into effect on January 19 this year but then-President-elect Trump instructed US Attorney to pause enforcement for 75 days.
Although the ban did not order it offline, TikTok went offline in the US for several hours over January 18 and 19 before Trump announced the delay.
In August 2020, in the final months of his first term, Trump signed a TikTok sale-or-ban order, citing the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to harvest compromising data about US citizens via the app. But ByteDance tied the order up with legal challenges until Trump was voted out of office. By his campaign for a second term, Trump had shifted to support the app.
In a December 2024 brief to the US Supreme Court, asking it to pause the sale-or-ban order, Trump called TikTok a “unique medium for freedom of expression”.
In a January 17 ruling, the court’s conservative majority upheld the ban.
- Agence France-Presse with reporting by Herald staff
