- Amid threats from President Donald Trump to ban TikTok, or force it to sell its US operations, it was reported that Twitter was in talks with the video-sharing app on Saturday night.
- The Wall Street Journal reported that a potential deal, if materialized, could involve TikTok’s US operations.
- Both Twitter and TikTok declined to comment on the report to Business Insider.
- Visit the Business Insider website for more stories.
Another tech giant was reported to be on TikTok’s dance card Saturday night – Twitter.
The Georgia Wells and Cara Lombardo of the Wall Street Journal reported that the two popular apps are in “preliminary” talks for a possible combination. “People familiar with the matter” told the paper that a deal in which it said Twitter might not end up being prosecuted would involve TikTok’s U.S. operations.
Twitter declined to comment on the report to Business Insider. Josh Gartner, head of corporate communications at TikTok, said: “We are not responding to rumors about market.”
President Donald Trump has harped on the popular video-sharing app to shut down his Chinese parent company, ByteDance, and indicated about security concerns. Last week, Trump said he would “ban” the app, which he can’t exactly, if ByteDance doesn’t sell.
Microsoft was seen last week as the frontrunner for a deal, with estimates for a potential deal for TikTok’s US operations at $ 10 billion and $ 30 billion, Business Insider’s Paige Leskin reported.
It’s unclear what a Twitter TikTok deal might look like, how much it could cost, or how Twitter could pay for it. The WSJ pointed out that Twitter’s market cap is about $ 29 billion, while Microsoft’s is $ 1.6 trillion more.
“Because it is much smaller, Twitter has argued that it is unlikely to have the same level of anti-trust control as Microsoft as other potential bidders, people familiar with the talks said,” Wells and Lombardo wrote.
Twitter has about 186 million users, according to its most recent earnings at the end of July. TikTok has more than 100 million users in the US alone.
