Lily Jamali
BBC technological correspondent, San Francisco
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President Donald Trump says he is “very close” to report an agreement to find a buyer for Tiktok, who faces an American ban if his Chinese owner does not sell the application by the weekend.
A bipartite law adopted by the congress last year requires that the Chinese mother company of Tiktok, Bytedance, sells the application.
The “ `platform was dark ” for a day in January in the United States after the entry into force of the law, until Trump intervened and delayed the ban on April 5.
The United States government said Tiktok is a threat to national security because the Chinese authorities could access its vast user data that Beijing denies.
Who could buy Tiktok?
Speaking Thursday on Air Force One, Trump said that “several investors” ended in an agreement.
He also suggested that the United States could offer according to the agreement where China agrees to approve a sale of Tiktok in exchange for relief from American prices on Chinese imports.
Several potential buyers have arisen in reports.
Amazon made a last minute offer to the White House to acquire Tiktok, according to the American partner of the BBC CBS.
Trump said he would be open to the sale of Tiktok at the co-founder of Oracle Larry Ellison, as well as Elon Musk, although the latter said that he had no intention of buying.
Other potential buyers include billionaire Frank McCourt, with Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary – a famous investor in Shark Tank, the American version of Dragons’ Den.
Alexis Ohanian, who co -founded Reddit, said in an article on X in March that he had joined Mr. McCourt’s offer.
The largest youtuber in the world Jimmy Donaldson – alias MRBEAST – also said that he was trying to buy Tiktok as part of a group of investors.
Tim Stokely, the British founder of Onlyfans, also offered to buy Tiktok under his recently relaunched company, Zoop.
Companies such as Microsoft, the Blackstone Investment Giant, the venture capital company based in California Andreessen Horowitz, and the perplexity of search engines, are also being executed.
The White House would have considered an option that Bytedance would keep the property of Tiktok algorithm, but would praise it to a new entity according to the video sharing application in the United States.
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MRBEAST is the most popular youtuber in the world with more than 300 m subscribers
If there is no contract, will Tiktok be banned?
If no agreement is concluded on April 5, the application could again face an American ban and be withdrawn from application stores.
Trump signed a decree in January, which delayed Tiktok’s ban only of 75 days.
His order has not canceled the prohibition of the application adopted by the Congress and confirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Trump could allow the law to stand up, but ask the Ministry of Justice to continue to ignore it.
The government would effectively say to Apple and Google that they will not be punished for allowing people to download Tiktok to their devices.
Tiktok returned to the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store in February, after the companies were informed that they would not face consequences to host it.
Trump also said that he would “probably” extend the deadline, if necessary.
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President Donald Trump said he “would like to see Tiktok stay alive”.
What other platforms could Tiktok users use instead?
Watch: Can young Americans live without Tiktok?
Tiktok says that it has 170 million American users who have passed – on average – 51 minutes per day on the application in 2024.
Experts say that competitors such as Instagram coils and YouTube shorts could benefit from Trump’s efforts to break a sale of Tiktok do not succeed.
“The marketing chiefs with whom we have spoken confirmed that they will divert their media dollars to Meta and Google if they can no longer advertise Tiktok,” said Kelsey Chickring, analyst of the market company Forrester.
The other potential winners include Amazon from Amazon, which has made its name by hosting Livestreams – a popular functionality on Tiktok. Twitch is well known in particular players, although its other content also develops.
Other platforms belonging to Chinese, such as Xiaohongshu-known as Rednote among its American users-have also experienced rapid growth in the United States and the United Kingdom.
