Looks like every big tech company in the U.S wants to acquire a piece of the TikTok pie. Oracle is the latest. The enterprise giant joins Microsoft and Twitter who have shown interest in acquiring TikTok operations in several countries including U.S., Canadian, Australian and New Zealand assets.
People familiar with the matter have said that Oracle’s talks are ongoing and have accelerated in recent days.
It’s worth noting that Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder and executive chairman is an open supporter of Donald Trump – he recently threw a campaign fundraising event for him earlier this year in his estate in Coachella Valley, California.
The U.S President has vowed to ban the viral app in his country if ByteDance doesn’t divest its U.S operations.
UPDATE: Donald Trump has expressed support for Oracle to buy TikTok.
On Tuesday, He reiterated his condition that whoever buys TikTok will have to be an American company and that they will have to make a payment to the U.S. government as part of the transaction.
“Well I think Oracle is a great company and I think its owner is a tremendous guy, a tremendous person. I think that Oracle would be certainly somebody that could handle it,” Donald said.
“I guess Microsoft wants it and so does Oracle. And probably so do other people. But they have to make sure the United States is well compensated. Because we’re the ones making it possible. So our Treasury has to be very well compensated. You have to put money into the Treasury,” he added.
In an interesting turn of events, Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey is now following TikTok Comms on Twitter. TikTok US twitter handle now follows Twitter support.
*Stares directly into camera* https://t.co/HwTqRRXv3E pic.twitter.com/kie6a8jKqE
— Techweez (@techweez) August 19, 2020
Oracle is a strange buyer seeing that it doesn’t have any consumer-facing social platforms – this fact alone makes Microsoft buying TikTok a loot cooler than it seemed when they announced their interest.
Nobody saw this coming.
because when I think relational databases, first thing that comes to mind is… https://t.co/4Yc9kUqIxs
— Ari Levy (@levynews) August 18, 2020
Critics have pointed that this could be Oracle messing with Microsoft.
Oracle is currently working with General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital as U.S investors. The two venture capital firms already own a stake in ByteDance.
Are you really even a tech company if you haven’t explored acquiring TikTok?
Who's next? Salesforce, Slack, SAP, Adobe?
"Oracle enters race to buy TikTok’s US operations"https://t.co/9DHItjrOVg pic.twitter.com/bkoQaLyXvg— Subrahmanyam KVJ (@SuB8u) August 18, 2020
TikTok recently started a new Twitter account and tiktokus.info, a website that organizes the company’s statements, aggregate positive news and stories in an effort to “set the record straight” about the app. TikTok also strongly refers to the growing concerns over U.S. user privacy and security as “rumors and misinformation” that are “proliferating in Washington and in the media.”
TikTok is the daily destination for millions of people to express themselves creatively. We have launched a new information hub to shine a light on the facts, and serve as a source of truth to address the misinformation about TikTok. https://t.co/3dfEibdNsB
— TikTokComms (@TikTokComms) August 17, 2020
The social media platform also recently partnered up with UnitedMasters, a music distribution company to let creators on the short video sharing platform distribute their songs directly to streaming services like YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music.
