Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corp., will speak at the Oracle OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco on October 22, 2018.
Bloomberg
Oracle, a business software giant, is in talks to acquire social media company TikTok from US, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand assets, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Oracle is working with a group of U.S. venture capital firms that already have an interest in TikTok, said the person, who asked not to be named because the negotiations are private. The Financial Times previously reported on the talks, citing General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital as two of the investors working with Oracle.
Spokesman for TikTok and Oracle declined to comment.
Oracle’s talks to acquire TikTok’s operations in four countries have been ongoing and accelerated in recent days, the person said, and it and Microsoft are far ahead of other companies that have expressed interest. While Microsoft has been working with the U.S. government for more than a month to acquire TikTok’s assets, Oracle’s co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison has expressed support for President Donald Trump, whose administration has promised to ban TikTok in the United States as Chinese. owner ByteDance will not distribute its US operations until November. Ellison threw a campaign fundraising event for Trump earlier this year.
“There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that ByteDance … can take action that threatens to restrict U.S. national security,” Trump said last week in an executive order.
Oracle does not have consumer-oriented social media as a video company. In theory, Oracle could use customer data collected by TikTok to improve its marketing products, but spending tens of billions to get a consumer social media company would be a significant departure for the company. Oracle is struggling to find new avenues of growth as Amazon Web Services has dominated cloud computing, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. In Oracle’s fiscal fourth quarter, revenue fell 6% to $ 10.4 billion. Oracle has a history of being acquired, but has been slowing down on big deals in recent years.
– CNBC’s Jordan Novet has contributed to this report.
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