Reports of a $20 billion dollar offer by Triller, a rival video-sharing platform to TikTok, has been dismissed by the company. TikTok has been threatened to be banished over accusations that the app shares the data of users, which raised concerns about sharing personal data with China.
What We Know:
- TikTok communications head Josh Gartner stated to Forbes, “we are not and will not be in talks with them”. Another spokesperson for TikTok confirmed Gartner’s response but added that they “are flattered by how much they admire TikTok”.
- According to CNBC, Triller’s executive chairman, Bobby Sarnevesht, did submit a bid to TikTok’s Beijing-based parent ByteDance, and stating “We have confirmation that the chairman [Zhang Yiming] and people pretty high up at ByteDance are aware of it, and, we have correspondence going.”
- The U.S.-based app Triller, recently partnered with a London-based investment firm Centricus Asset Management to help facilitate the $20 billion offer. The offer would have purchase operations in Australia, New Zealand, India, and U.S., nations where the app has already been banned or will be banned in the near future.
- However, Reuters reported that ByteDance claimed they had no knowledge of an offer from Triller and Centricus stating, “the company has not had any conversations with them and we are unaware of any interest.”
- TikTok, an indirect successor to the once-popular “Musical.ly” app, now has over 100 million monthly active users in the United States alone. With such an explosion of popularity and amount of usage, it even got the Trump administration’s attention, accusing it of having ties to China in a way that it makes a threat to national security.
- The Trump administration has set a November 12th deadline for TikTok to sell its U.S. operations. Oracle now joins other giants like Microsoft, Twitter, and most recently Walmart, in a bidding war to buy the popular app before it gets banished by the White House over accusations that it shares user’s personal information to the Chinese government, a claim that TikTok still denies.
In TikTok’s defensive, their denial was backed up with an argument about the user’s data. They state that all U.S. user data is stored in the U.S itself. They have admitted they maintain a large backup in Singapore, but all its data centers are reportedly outside of China, thus not being subject to Chinese law.
