As the clock ticks down on the Trump administration’s deadline for China’s TikTok to find a U.S. buyer, e-commerce giant Amazon has thrown its hat into the ring, making a last-minute bid for the popular social media app.
NBC News reports that Amazon has emerged as a potential suitor for TikTok, the embattled social media platform facing a ban in the United States unless it can find a non-Chinese buyer by Saturday, April 5. The bid, which arrived via a letter to Vice President JD Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, comes just days before the deadline set by President Donald Trump.
The fate of TikTok in the U.S. has been uncertain since last year when then-President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation forcing its Chinese-based owner, ByteDance, to sell the app to a non-Chinese buyer or face a nationwide ban. Despite the looming deadline, ByteDance has not publicly confirmed talks with any buyers or officially stated its willingness to sell TikTok.
White House officials and Vance aides have been tight-lipped about the details of the TikTok talks, with the full slate of potential buyers or partners remaining unknown. President Trump has expressed a willingness to extend the deadline if an agreement is not reached by Saturday, an outcome Vice President Vance would like to avoid.
In an interview with NBC News last month, Vance acknowledged that while the broad contours of a TikTok deal could be in place by the deadline, the finer points might take longer to reconcile. “Typically, some of these deals that are much smaller and involve much less capital take months to close,” Vance said. “We’re trying to close this thing by early April. I think that the outlines of this thing will be very clear. The question is whether we can get all the paper done.”
The bipartisan efforts to ban TikTok date back to Trump’s first presidential term, during which he unsuccessfully tried to ban the app. Since then, the president has shifted his stance, even sharing a viral video on the platform during his campaign for a nonconsecutive second term, in which he said he was going to “save TikTok.”
TikTok had challenged the potential ban, but the Supreme Court upheld it in the final days of the Biden administration. The app briefly went dark in the U.S. just before Trump’s inauguration but restored service after the president signaled he would review the ban.
Earlier this week, Trump appeared confident that there would be a deal, telling reporters, “We have a lot of potential buyers. There’s tremendous interest in TikTok. The decision is going to be my decision. TikTok is, it’s very interesting, and a lot of people want to buy it.”
Other suitors that have expressed interest in acquiring the app include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who joined billionaire investor Frank McCourt’s bid; artificial intelligence search engine startup Perplexity AI; and Steven Mnuchin, treasury secretary in the first Trump administration.
Read more at NBC News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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