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. The American version is designed to function as an enabler of social contagions, highlighting the most aberrant behaviors and conditioning its mostly younger users to think of them as normal.
It's a grooming app, but Democrats in 2020 called Trump 45 all kinds of bad names for wanting it banned or sold.
Once the Democrats were back in power and no longer needed TikTok as a cudgel against Trump, they changed their tune. Congress passed — and President Joe Biden's autopen signed — legislation last year banning the platform this year if ByteDance can't find a Western buyer.
The deadline has passed and the law was upheld by the Supreme Court earlier this year, but here's what I had to say about that at the time: "Suppose Congress passed a law to ban a Communist Chinese spyware/social-malware app, the president signed it, and the Supreme Court upheld it, but nobody made it happen."
Not even Trump seems fully on board with his own proposal from 2020.
What we don't know includes how much the offer is worth. Not even Amazon's impressive war chest is likely big enough, however, so other details shareholders of both companies need to know is whether the bid includes a share swap, backing from various financial institutions, Jeff Bezos's sofa-cushion change, etc.
The NYT report casts doubt on the deal because "Various parties who have been involved in the talks do not appear to be taking Amazon’s bid seriously." But I think it makes perfect sense, regardless of whether or not it goes through.
Amazon is behind the eight ball on AI development. The generative version of Alexa (Alexa+) has yet to go public and, according to some reports, the Alexa digital assistant costs Amazon a jaw-dropping $10 billion a year to run. Just from a business standpoint, both things need to change — and that's where TikTok comes in.
Grok — the AI originally developed by X — shows the way. Grok became so useful so quickly because it has access to X's 24/7/365 flow of data from its 300 million users about everything from everywhere. And it gets all that data for free. Grok is so valuable that it was spun out as a separate business, xAI, that just bought X. Wild, eh?
So it's easy to see why Amazon and TikTok would be, if not a match made in Heaven, at least a match made in data-hoovering Hell.
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