Amazon has recently made an offer to buy TikTok, the New York Times reported on Wednesday. However, according to the Washington Post, the offer is not being seriously considered by the White House, and several other options are being considered.
As the NYT reported, Amazon made its offer to completely take over TikTok in the form of a letter addressed to Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. The proposal came in recent days, when the fate of the Chinese application is hanging in the balance, because Saturday is the deadline set by Donald Trump, by which TikTok was to agree to be taken over by an American company, to avoid disappearing from the American market.
According to the Washington Post, the giant's offer is not being seriously considered by the White House, which is considering a number of other options. The topic was to be discussed at a meeting at the White House on Wednesday with top administration officials, including Vance and Lutnick, as well as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz.
TikTok on lease?
According to “WP”, one of the options being considered would be to increase foreign shares in TikTok itself, but to retain the rights to the key algorithm on which the application is based, by the Chinese owner ByteDance. In such a scenario, ByteDance would lend TikTok the algorithm under a lease.
The newspaper notes, however, that such a solution would not allay the concerns behind the law introduced by Congress to ban TikTok from operating in the US under Chinese control. One of the leading concerns is the possibility of China secretly influencing and manipulating content reaching tens of millions of Americans through an algorithm. Others concern the acquisition of sensitive data about American users by the PRC.
Other investors besides Amazon have also expressed their interest in acquiring TikTok, including the Blackstone fund and the IT company Oracle. Media reports on the subject have also mentioned other potential buyers. Billionaire Frank McCourt, a Canadian investor known from the reality show “Shark Tank,” and Silicon Valley investors close to Trump from the Andreesen Horowitz fund, have been mentioned.
Although the law banning Chinese-controlled TikTok theoretically went into effect the day before Trump’s inauguration, and TikTok has temporarily disappeared from the American internet, Trump announced on his first day in office that he would not enforce the law for 75 days to allow time for a deal to be struck to acquire the app. The president has indicated that he can always extend that period. He has also said in recent days that he could also lower tariffs on Chinese goods in exchange for Beijing’s approval of such a deal.
So far, neither ByteDance nor the Chinese government – which has placed TikTok's algorithm under an export ban – have made it clear whether they would agree to any deal.
From Washington Oskar Górzyński (PAP)
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