Trump Administration wanted Microsoft to buy TikTok

Nadella says he is not much concerned about the past TikTok incident and is happy with what he has.

In an event at the Code Conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that at one point of time in August 2020, the company was in talks to buy TikTok, Trump administration was hard on the platform. Ultimately, TikTok turned Microsoft down and went with oracle and the issue dissipated.

Nadella said he was initially intrigued by it but later decided to let it go in the hands of Oracle. He also said, that “TikTok came to us; we didn’t come to TikTok.” It was looking for a US partner to help with the security things related to the ban.

Nadella thought TikTok might have been a good fit because it was a social, cloud-based service that heavily leveraged AI, all focus areas for the company. According to Nadella, Microsoft would have been an interesting partner for TikTok because of its established work with “investments in social media, particularly what we’re doing in content moderation and child safety.” Apart from that, Microsoft is one of the main US-based cloud service providers.

There was a period of time when he thought the US government had a particular set of requirements, but it just disappeared. As per him, President Trump had a particular point of view of what he was trying to get done, but it then suddenly dropped off. Now, Nadella says he is not much concerned about the past TikTok incident and is happy with what he has.