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President Donald Trump wants Communist China-based ByteDance to sell social media platform TikTok, but serious buyers have been scarce — until maybe today. Maybe.
Details are scarce, too. The New York Times report relies on three anonymous sources „familiar with the bid“, but what we do know is juicy. The bid was made in a letter addressed to Vice President JD Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to one of the NYT’s unnamed sources.
The bidder? None other than Amazon, the online retailing giant with an estimated $79 billion in cash and equivalents just begging to be spent. TikTok, if its best-in-class dopamine-jacking algorithm is included in the sale, is worth an estimated $100-$200 billion.
The drama is underscored by the legal battle against ByteDance that’s gone all the way to the Supreme Court. Trump tried to get TikTok banned during his first term because the app is a serious national security and cultural risk. You see, the video-sharing platform collects reams of data, just like privacy-busting behemoths such as Meta (owner of Instagram and Facebook) and Alphabet (parent of Google). While China’s ByteDance corporation (owner of TikTok) pinky-swears that data doesn’t reach China… well, you’ll just have to take its word for it, and Xi Jinping’s, too.
The Chinese version of TikTok serves its youthful audience a healthy diet of science, technology, math, history, life skills, patriotic themes, physical fitness, etc.
