ByteDance rejects Microsoft's offer to acquire US branch of TikTok

What was announced as an imminent sale will ultimately not take place, as ByteDance unveiled recently that it will not sell TikTok's US operations to Microsoft.

With that, this decision leaves Oracle alone in the buyers bank Potentials known so far to the app and some US and Chinese media reported on Sunday that ByteDance had designated the latter as its "technology partner."

However, Oracle's offer to buy TikTok has not been publicly accepted by the Chinese Internet company.

The future of TikTok in the US market is very uncertain, although many expected a sale to Microsoft, at its level, ByteDance is not considering this possibility and advised the company on Sunday.

“ByteDance let us know today that they will not sell the US TikTok business to Microsoft. We are confident that our proposal would have been good for TikTok users, while protecting national security interests, ”Microsoft said Sunday in a blog post on its official website.

ByteDance has not made any statement on why Microsoft's offer was rejected. On the contrary, sources involved in the TikTok acquisition negotiations told the New York Times that the owner of the social network named Oracle as its technology partner in its operations in the United States.

This election does not allow knowing if Oracle would also take a majority stake in the company (TikTok), in addition to being unsure if this could lead the Trump administration to not ban the application.

Indeed, this choice seems strategic because, unlike many other tech companies, Oracle has cultivated close ties with the Trump administration.

For example, its founder, Larry Ellison, organized a fundraiser for Trump this year and its CEO, Safra Catz, was on the president's transition team and frequently visited the White House.

Also, last month, Trump said he would support Oracle's purchase of TikTok. He called Oracle a "great company," believing it could run TikTok successfully.

"I have no doubt that Oracle would definitely be someone who could do it," he said. Oracle's relationship with the Trump administration has come under scrutiny.

Sources familiar with the matter have reportedly told him that ByteDance will not be sold to Microsoft or Oracle and that the company will not deliver the source code to US buyers either.

And it is that recently the leaders of TikTok partially disclosed how the application's algorithm worked.

Related article:
TikTok revealed some details about how its algorithm works

In particular, this code is the source of Washington's concerns about the application. In this regard, in an interview, Brad Smith, president and CEO of Microsoft, said that while studying TikTok, he identified two potential threats.

According to him, these threats are related to security. The first is that Chinese authorities can use existing and new national security laws to reclaim data from TikTok users.

Since users cannot opt ​​out of this tracking, the only solution would be to transfer the data from Americans to servers that are located in the United States.

Speaking of which, it turns out that TikTok currently uses a large server located in Virginia, but it backs up some of its data in Singapore, and it is questionable whether one of these huge pools of user data could be accessed by Chinese authorities.

According to him, the only way to ensure that TikTok's Chinese engineers don't design code and algorithms that affect what users see or don't see would be for Microsoft to take over the code and algorithms.

However, he is now expelled from the race. Separately, Sunday's series of fast-paced events came as the clock ticks Trump's executive order, which says TikTok essentially had to strike a deal to sell its US business before Sept. 15 or take a chance. to be blocked in the United States.

Related article:
China prefers to see TikTok closed rather than forced sale

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