Twitter Is Negotiating With Chinese Video-Sharing Giant For A Possible Merger
Image Credit – Economic Times
After talks about banning the Chinese-owned video-sharing app, TikTok by the U.S. government, a potential merger between Twitter and TikTok is supposedly in the early stages. This event escalated after the Trump administration declared the Chinese app as a national-security threat, Dow Jones reported.
It is still not sure if Twitter will finally be able to make the deal with TikTok, which will give them full authority over its U.S. operations. The sources familiar with the matter told Dow Jones that being a smaller company than the giants like Microsoft Corp or other potential bidders, Twitter faces a lesser amount of antitrust scrutiny.
The people confirmed that Microsoft has been in talks for the past weeks with TikTok owner Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., negotiating a deal with them. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella even discussed the matter with President Donald Trump a week ago. Microsoft is now one of the possible candidates for the potential merger.
To answer an inquiry on Dow Jones’ report, a TikTok’s representative stated that the company would not respond to ‘market rumors’.
According to Dow Jones, Twitter will be needing financial help from other investors if it wants to buy TikTok as its market capitalization is about $29 billion while Microsoft’s is more than $1.6 trillion. Twitter has private-equity firm Silver Lake among its investors.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had a bad experience dealing with another short video making and sharing app Vine. Four years after acquiring the app, Twitter shut it down in 2016 in an attempt to cut down on the costs. The company along with Facebook Inc has been under criticism by President Donald Trump, who accused both of the companies of unfairly censoring him after both platforms blocked a video for violating their policies on Coronavirus misinformation, which was shared by accounts linked to Trump.
TikTok said that they were ‘shocked’ about the ban, in their blog post on Friday and will be doing their best to tackle the matter. They have already planned to file a federal lawsuit as soon as possible countering President Trump’s executive order of banning the video-sharing platform from the USA, citing it as unconstitutional.
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