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Remember when Donald Trump’s administration tried to force Beijing-based ByteDance to sell TikTok, its hugely popular music app, to an American company? Microsoft’s CEO does, and he’d rather you remember it as a wacky little corporate adventure.
In August 2020, the Trump administration began put the screws to TikTok, citing emergency powers to demand that ByteDance sell a controlling stake in the app or face a broadcast ban (as via Google Play or Apple’s App Store) in the United States in September. The White House justified the case as a crackdown on the suspected spy threat posed by a tech company linked to an infamous Communist enemy.
Still, it quickly became clear that Trump saw the deal as a quid pro quo with any U.S. company that would get a hefty share of the enforcement, arguing that because the Feds were forcing the deal, the Treasury should get a bounce. It certainly seemed also suspicious that the then president also resented the app courtesy of the teens at TikTok who allegedly booked thousands of tickets for a Trump rally in Tulsa in June 2020 before failing to show up. The event actually saw pathetic turnout, humiliating re-election campaign manager Brad Parscale, who claimed 1.2 million participants had registered. TikTok has finally succeeded in pushing back the threat of ban in court and avoided any sell-off, but not before a string of potential bidders lined up, including Microsoft, which then lost to a joint bid from Oracle and Walmart.
On Monday, Satya Nadella spoke at the Code 2021 Conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., where he said he remained baffled by the deal but defended Microsoft’s proposal to acquire a stake in TikTok. According to the edge, Nadella called the de facto extortion attempt a “The strangest thing I’ve ever worked on.” “
Nadella admitted that he “was a little intrigued by this… and then I guess the rest is history.” He also insisted that TikTok was the one who wanted to partner with Microsoft and not the other way around.
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According to CNBC, continued Nadella, “First of all you have to remember that TikTok came to see us, we didn’t go to TikTok. TikTok was caught between a lot of issues they were having in two capitals, and they wanted to TikTok wanted a security-focused cloud provider, he added, “But I was quite intrigued. And let’s say it’s a big property, obviously.”
It’s a bit like saying the hostage wanted to be redeemed, but OK.
Nadella went on to say that Microsoft was effectively excluded from any potential deal by the “particular” perspective of the Trump administration.
“President Trump, I think he kind of had a particular take on what he was trying to do there,” Nadella told the audience. “Then just fell. It was interesting. There was a period when I felt the USG had a particular set of requirements, and then they just disappeared. “
In fact, what really happened was that Trump went off the rails, backtracked and pretended he prefers to ban the application than to keep pushing for a deal. This broke Microsoft’s offer corn opened the door to Oracle, whose top management is conveniently stacked with Trump cronies and has certainly seen the interest in extorting what had become one of the country’s most popular social media apps. It probably didn’t help that Microsoft employees would have urged management to pull out of a TikTok deal, with an internal Yammer poll showing just 18% support. Some Microsoft employees have said suing the company would be unethical, while founder Bill Gates told Wired the deal could be a “poisoned chalice” and “for Trump to kill the only competitor is pretty weird”.
The real offer Oracle and Walmart ended up putting forward did not look like that of the Trump administration initial requests at allbecause it would only become a minority stakeholder and a “trusted technology provider”. Oracle never really clarified how all of this would solve the Trump administration’s stated espionage problems, instead of just being a shakedown of ByteDance’s golden calf.
Then the Trump administration actually seemed to lose interest in the whole, no do good on the threat of ban and the extension of the September deadline several times. Meanwhile, the US government suffered a series of humiliating losses in a court that made it clear that if the Commerce Department actually tried to ban TikTok, it could be overturned by a federal judge. Joe Biden later actually killed the case (technically, it is on hold indefinitely). This means neither Oracle nor Walmart ended up getting its piece of Mammon, let alone Microsoft.
According to CNBC, Nadella argued that Microsoft would have been a good partner for TikTok because it already has a handful of other social apps: “You better know something about the exploitation of social media, which we know from Xbox Live. or LinkedIn. ” But he told the attendees that he was “happy with what I got.”
Monday, TikTok exceeded one billion users.
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