Walmart Teams With Microsoft In Bid To Buy TikTok

August 27, 2020 Business, Technology

Yahoo Finance reports:

Retail giant Walmart said Thursday it had teamed with Microsoft to buy TikTok, the Chinese-owned short-form video app that has come under fire from the administration of President Donald Trump. The app has been at the center of a diplomatic storm between Washington and Beijing since Trump signed an executive order on August 6 giving Americans 45 days to stop doing business with its Chinese parent company ByteDance.

The president claims TikTok could be used by China to track the locations of federal employees, build dossiers on people for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage. The order effectively set a deadline for a sale of TikTok to a US company, with Trump insisting that the US should get a cut for its role in making the deal happen. The potential gold mine of younger users’ data could also help Walmart compete more strongly with online retail rival Amazon.

TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer has quit as the Chinese-owned video sharing app faces enormous backlash and threats of a ban from President Trump https://t.co/prUgrMYvhu

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) August 27, 2020

Retail giant Walmart is joining Microsoft’s bid to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations https://t.co/FP32wGX19L pic.twitter.com/jgKWa4vm0Z

— Forbes (@Forbes) August 27, 2020