Microsoft is in talks to buy TikTok operations in US

Microsoft is said to be in talks to buy TikTok’s operations in America even Trump’s administration is weighing on China-based ByteDance Ltd. to divest its stake in TikTok’s U.S. operations. Trump administration officials say that they have been concerned that TikTok poses a threat to national security and may be banned.

Fox Business Network’s Charles Gasparino tweeted this and it has been corroborated by The New York Times, Bloomberg, and The Information 

Bloomberg reported that the president was poised to announce an order that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations.

“We are looking at TikTok. We may be banning TikTok,” Trump told reporters Friday at the White House. “We are looking at a lot of alternatives with respect to TikTok.”

This deal would give the software company a popular social-media site and relieve U.S. government pressure on the Chinese owner of the video-sharing app.

Though Bytedance is based in China and has repeatedly disagreed with the accusations that it feeds user data to China, it has not been able to convince the Trump administration otherwise. To show this, ByteDance hired a U.S.-based chief executive officer, Kevin Mayer to be the CEO of TikTok and COO of ByteDance, reporting directly to the company CEO Zhang Yiming. ByteDance has considered making other organizational changes to satisfy U.S. authorities.

ByteDance was founded by Zhang Yiming in 2012 and is reportedly worth over US$100 billion as of May 2020