There’s 71 more days to make a deal for TikTok after the White House last week extended, yet again, the deadline for ByteDance to divest the service to a company from the U.S. or another country deemed friendly to the U.S.
“We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark,” President Donald Trump said late last week on Truth Social. “We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Keeping TikTok alive in the U.S. is a big deal for its 170 million American users and many companies. It could be a particularly big deal for Amazon.com, which last week emerged as a potential suitor for TikTok’s assets.
“It checks two pretty big boxes,” TD Cowen analyst John Blackledge says of Amazon potentially buying TikTok. “It would give them access to a significant social platform. It would also accelerate their position in social commerce.”
A third of American adults use TikTok, and that goes up to 59% for the coveted under-30 demographic, according to a 2024 survey from the Pew Research Center. Over half of teenagers 13 to 17 use it every day. Even one-out-of-ten seniors use TikTok.
TikTok pioneered the full-screen endless scroll of short vertical videos that has been copied by Meta Platforms’ Instagram and Alphabet’s YouTube as they try to fight back against the threat to their social media dominance.
A more recent phenomena is TikTok Shop, where brands and independent video-makers can sell goods directly on the platform. Along with popular shopping apps Shein and Temu, TikTok Shop represents a threat to Amazon.com’s e-commerce dominance.
Like Instagram and YouTube, Amazon had a TikTok clone named Inspire built into the Amazon app beginning in 2022, shortly after ByteDance began beta testing TikTok Shop in the U.K. Though it tried to incentivize popular TikTok e-commerce accounts to switch over, the service failed to get traction. Amazon closed Inspire in February.
TikTok Shop would provide an immediate and significant social-commerce improvement for Amazon, while adding to its already substantial advertising revenue.
Amazon buying TikTok remains a long shot. A person familiar with the matter told Barron’s last week that various parties that have been involved in the talks didn’t appear to be taking Amazon’s bid seriously. There are likely to be antitrust concerns, as well.
A bonus for Amazon could be the potential to move much of TikTok’s global cloud services to its own cloud, AWS. Currently TikTok’s U.S. cloud provider is Oracle.
Any TikTok deal could still take a while to come together. The person familiar with the matter told Barron’s last week that a deal to sell a majority of the social media app to a group of U.S. buyers was derailed by the president’s latest tariff announcements. ByteDance representatives called the White House last Thursday to indicate China would no longer approve the deal until there could be negotiations about trade and tariffs, the person said.
On Monday, Trump said on Truth Social that if China doesn’t withdraw the 34% tariff increase it threatened against the U.S. by Tuesday, he would impose additional tariffs on the country and “all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated.” This leaves the future of TikTok in the U.S. up in the air.
Oracle may still have an inside track on the deal. The person familiar with the matter told Barron’s that the Trump administration was finalizing plans for potential investors that could include Oracle.
In Trump’s first term as President, Oracle Executive Chairman Larry Ellison used his close relationship with the president to get TikTok’s U.S. cloud business. With a TikTok stake, Oracle may be looking to add most of the rest of the world to that. But it would also add on social media, advertising and e-commerce, three things Oracle has no experience with. It has never had a real consumer-facing business.
Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com and Angela Palumbo at angela.palumbo@dowjones.com
