Because a political decision about the future of TikTok in the USA is imminent, some big names in the tech industry are thinking together about how a possible forced sale could be handled. This is reported by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), citing unnamed sources.
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On Wednesday next week, the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on a proposed law that would force the Chinese company ByteDance to sell TikTok within six months. If this does not happen, the app will disappear from the US stores of Apple and Google. After TikTok even asked its US users to exert political influence on MPs via direct messages in the app, politicians are now quite angry, reports the Journal. In Washington, according to the WSJ, broad approval in the House of Representatives is expected after TikTok's action. The law then has to go through the Senate.
Bobby Kottick and Sam Altman are interested
Aside from politics, according to the WSJ, there are supposed to be discussions between business representatives about how one could buy TikTok. The long-time CEO of Activision/Blizzard, Bobby Kotick, who left in December, is said to have met with Sam Altman from OpenAI last week, among others. Together with others, they discussed taking over TikTok. For OpenAI, this is about the Chinese company's database, which it wants to use to train its AIs.
Kotick is supposed to take on the role of the financier who raises the money for the purchase. He has already met with representatives from TikTok about this. According to the Wall Street Journal, every model calculation would estimate US entrepreneurs to be in the “hundreds of billions of dollars.” The report does not say which companies should collect this money and how. Given the numerous layoffs in the US tech industry, it seems unclear how this will work. For comparison: The largest economic aid from the current US government, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, has a volume of around 500 billion US dollars.
(NO)