Amazon Makes Last Minute Offer for TikTok
Credit: koshiro / Adobe Stock
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Could we see “TikTok Prime” sometime in the near future? The New York Times reports that retail giant Amazon has made a bid to become TikTok’s new owner. With an April 5 deadline looming, the social network could soon be shut down if a suitable buyer isn’t found.
According to the Times‘ sources, multiple parties involved in the talks “do not appear to be taking Amazon’s bid seriously.” The Amazon bid reportedly came via an offer letter addressed to Vice President JD Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. In addition to Amazon’s bid, there are several other interested parties also pleading their cases to be given the green light on the purchase.
Early last year, the US Congress passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), which gave TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, until January 19, 2025, to divest itself of the social network. Otherwise, it would be banned in the United States.
However, instead of searching for buyers, the company appealed the ruling, arguing the law was unconstitutional because it violated the First Amendment. Unfortunately for ByteDance, the US Supreme Court rejected that argument.
In a unanimous 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the law, concluding that “Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary” and that “TikTok’s scale and susceptibility to foreign adversary control, together with the vast swaths of sensitive data the platform collects, justify differential treatment to address the Government’s national security concerns.”
ByteDance has said it will not sell TikTok, primarily due to the app’s complex and proprietary algorithms. These would need to be detached from ByteDance’s software tools. The Chinese government has also weighed in, opposing a sale, as it believes the proprietary TikTok algorithm would need to be included in any such sale.
When US President Donald Trump took office in January, he did as he had promised on the campaign trail and ordered the Department of Justice to hold off enforcing the law for a 75-day period. That period expires on Saturday, April 5, and any sale of TikTok’s US operations to a non-Chinese firm must be set by then, or the app will once again be shut down.
Several interested parties have made offers, including companies like Oracle and Perplexity. In addition, several well-off individuals have expressed interest in purchasing TikTok, including Shark Tank host Kevin O’Leary, Employer.com founder Jesse Tinsley, Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast), and billionaire Frank McCourt.
President Trump will meet with White House officials on Wednesday to discuss a possible sale, and he has stated that he will make the final decision on the app’s future.
While Trump has voiced the idea of making a deal that brings in multiple investors, such as technology giant Oracle and private equity firm Blackstone, such a deal may not be considered an actual sale, meaning it may not meet the law’s requirements.
In March, Senators Edward Markey (D-MA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) on Monday wrote a letter to President Trump, telling him that while the executive order he made in January prevented TikTok and related companies from being prosecuted during the ban delay period, it stopped short of making the app legal.
That means the penalties that could be levied against Apple and Google as the app distributors and Oracle as the cloud service provider could be as much as $850 billion — $5,000 per user who downloads or updates the TikTok app multiplied by the 170 million TikTok users in the US.
