Digital Business Deal TikTok #2

Taken from DealBook Briefing August 18, 2020 The race for TikTok gets (even more) interesting

As the Chinese-owned video app negotiates to sell itself to avoid being banned in the U.S., The Financial Times reports that a surprising new suitor has emerged: Oracle, the Silicon Valley giant better known for business software than for social networking.

Oracle has held preliminary talks with ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, according to the FT. Its aim was to buy TikTok’s operations in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the same assets that Microsoft has publicly said it is negotiating to acquire. Like Microsoft and any other potential buyer, Oracle’s talks have included ByteDance investors such as Sequoia and General Atlantic.

• Oracle is only the latest company to express interest in buying TikTok after the Trump administration’s demand to transfer ownership of the app to an American company: Twitter had previously emerged as a suitor, and others are in the mix as well, DealBook’s Michael de la Merced hears. Oracle has an advantage: close ties to the White House. Both Larry Ellison, its co-founder, and Safra Catz, its C.E.O., are among the few prominent Trump supporters in Silicon Valley. It arguably has a better relationship with the Trump administration than even Microsoft, which has itself navigated the current Washington landscape more deftly than rivals like Alphabet and Facebook. • But Oracle also faces a question: What would it do with TikTok, given that it has little experience in the way of consumer-facing businesses? The White House is expanding its battle against the Chinese tech industry. The Commerce Department widened restrictions on Huawei, making it harder for the company to buy chips made or designed with American equipment and and software. The net effect of all these moves, The Times notes, is a potential splintering of the internet.