TikTok is poised to receive yet another reprieve from a potential ban in the US if a deal is not reached regarding the company’s local business. The confirmation comes straight from President Donald Trump, noting that he would like to get the deal finalized, but would offer another extension if it is required.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but I have a little warm spot in my heart for TikTok. TikTok is — it’s very interesting, but it’ll be protected,” Trump was quoted as saying by NBC. “It’ll be very strongly protected. But if it needs an extension, I would be willing to give it an extension. Might not need it.”
The spectre of a nationwide ban has loomed over TikTok for a while now, owing to security concerns around the data of US citizens being accessed by the Chinese government. The solution? Sell the US operations to a local business, though nothing concrete has come out of that proposal so far.
Why does it matter?
In January, TikTok went dark in the US after the Supreme Court upheld a ruling seeking a nationwide ban. In addition to TikTok, a bunch of other apps owned by the parent company, ByteDance, were also delisted by Apple and Google from their respective app stores.
The ban happened after TikTok was asked to divest its US operations from its China-based parent company. Numerous companies, including Walmart, Oracle, and Microsoft, reportedly expressed interest in buying the US operations of TikTok, but a deal could not be struck before the deadline.
However, merely less than a day into the nationwide outage, President Trump granted an extension worth 90 days and lifted the ban. A few months later, in April, he further pushed the deadline to ensure that the deal goes through. That is yet to happen.
Interestingly, the latest round of sweeping tariffs imposed by President Trump, which hurt China the most among the affected countries, blocked any chances of a TikTok deal. “A deal had been agreed to as of Wednesday, but the recently imposed tariffs on China presented a late breaking hurdle,” says an NBC News report.
What’s next for TikTok?
The list of parties interested in buying TikTok is long and pretty diverse. According to Reuters, Amazon was among the entities that threw a last-minute bid to purchase the social media platform’s US arm. A consortium led by Tim Stokely, owner of adult social media site OnlyFans, was also in the race.
Venture capital giant, Andreessen Horowitz, is also in line to scoop the viral social media platform, in partnership with software giant, Oracle. The People’s Bid for TikTok is yet another group that wants to buy TikTok. Backers of this initiative include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Shark Tank fame Kevin O’Leary, and World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee.
Another group that expressed interest in the multi-billion-dollar deal includes YouTube creator Jimmy “Mr. Beast” Donaldson and Roblox founder David Baszucki. In the Big Tech arena, we have Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Perplexity, and Walmart waiting to snag the local operations of TikTok.
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