Amazon joins list of TikTok suitors as deadline for U.S. buyer nears

The app has been in limbo in the U.S. since last year, when then-President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation that forced its Chinese-based owner, ByteDance, to sell it to a non-Chinese buyer or face a nationwide ban. No such deal came to fruition, and Trump extended the deadline through an executive order he signed on his first day in office, effectively giving TikTok until Saturday, April 5, to find a solution that would keep it online.

ByteDance, which has previously said it did not plan to sell, still has not publicly confirmed talks with any buyers and has not officially stated that it is now willing to sell TikTok.

White House officials and Vance aides have kept a close hold on details of the TikTok talks, with the full slate of potential buyers or partners remaining a mystery. And despite Wednesday’s scheduled meeting, there was no sign of an imminent deal. Trump, for his part, has expressed a willingness to extend the deadline again if an agreement is not reached by Saturday. 

That’s an outcome Vance has said he would like to avoid. But the vice president acknowledged in an interview with NBC News last month that while the broad contours of a TikTok deal could be in place by the deadline, the finer points might take longer to reconcile.

“Typically, some of these deals that are much smaller and involve much less capital take months to close,” Vance, who worked in venture capital before entering politics as a U.S. senator from Ohio, said at the time. “We’re trying to close this thing by early April. I think that the outlines of this thing will be very clear. The question is whether we can get all the paper done.”

Bipartisan efforts to ban the app date back to Trump’s first presidential term, during which he tried unsuccessfully to ban TikTok. Since then, the president has shifted his stance. While running for a non-consecutive second term last year, Trump shared a viral video on the platform in which he said he was going to “save TikTok.”

TikTok had challenged the potential ban, but the Supreme Court upheld it in the final days of the Biden administration. The app briefly went dark in the U.S. just before Trump’s inauguration, but restored service after the president signaled he would review the ban.

Earlier this week, Trump appeared confident that there would be a deal.

“We have a lot of potential buyers,” he told reporters. “There’s tremendous interest in TikTok. The decision is going to be my decision. TikTok is, it’s very interesting, and a lot of people want to buy it.”

Suitors that have expressed interest in acquiring the app include the likes of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who joined billionaire investor Frank McCourt’s bid; artificial intelligence search engine startup Perplexity AI; and former Trump administration treasury secret Steven Mnuchin.