US President Donald Trump revealed that Microsoft is in talks to buy TikTok, and he said he would like to see a bidding war for the app, which has been raising national security concerns because it is owned by China’s ByteDance.

When asked whether Microsoft was in talks to buy TikTok, Trump said yes. He added, “A lot of interest in TikTok. There’s great interest in TikTok.”

However, there was no immediate response from Microsoft, TikTok, or ByteDance when Reuters sought comments after Trump’s statements aboard Air Force One on Monday.

Buildingmicrosoft — Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The current negotiation is the new twist in a long-running drama of TikTok’s uncertain future in the United States. Microsoft had been one of the main stakeholders in a previous attempt at this kind of takeover in 2020, back when Trump was on his first term as president. Then, Trump mandated that TikTok separate its operations in the U.S. from ByteDance due to issues of national security.

Microsoft had emerged as the lead bidder for the app, but the negotiations eventually fell apart, and the push for divestment ended after Trump’s presidency concluded. Still, the situation remains far from resolved, as TikTok continues to attract the attention of possible buyers.

TikTok, which counts about 170 million American users, was at the beginning of this month under significant uncertainty when it was briefly withdrawn from access ahead of the 19 January deadline for ByteDance to either sell the app or face a potential ban on national security grounds. With the 20 January swearing-in of President Biden, Trump signed an executive order postponing the enforcement of this law for another 75 days.

Last week, in a separate statement, Trump said that he had been talking to several parties about the future of TikTok and indicated that a decision regarding the fate of the app may be made in the next 30 days.
Trump earlier also hinted that he would be open to allowing billionaire Elon Musk to buy the platform. Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, has yet to comment on Trump’s suggestion publicly.

In a surprising turn of events, AI startup Perplexity AI offered to merge with TikTok, proposing that up to half of the newly formed company would be given to the U.S. government in the future. Reuters reported this over the weekend.

Reflecting on Microsoft’s prior involvement in 2020, CEO Satya Nadella once described the talks as the “strangest thing I’ve ever worked on.” He noted that the U.S. government had laid out a specific set of requirements for the deal, only for the discussions to dissipate shortly after.