Microsoft isn’t the only interested who wants to buy TikTok. Twitter has held “preliminary discussions” about buying US companies from TikTok, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Twitter believes that, compared to Microsoft, it would receive less antitrust scrutiny. Nevertheless, the US company of TikTok is estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars, while the overall market capitalization of Twitter is about $29 billion. In its most recent quarter, it also lost more than $1.2 billion.
So for TikTok to buy, Twitter will need serious investors.
Videos are created and shared using TikTok. Just like Vine and Dubsmash, there are similar apps that came before it. It has had a precursor, Musical.ly, which was founded in 2014 by the Chinese entrepreneurs Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang. In 2017, ByteDance acquired Musical.ly, folding the service and its user base into TikTok. It now has more than one billion monthly active users worldwide and ByteDance is considered one of the most successful startups in the world.
ByteDance maintains the data about US users are stored in the US. Still, it was ordered by President Donald Trump to sell its operations in the US to avoid a ban.
If you’re a TikTok user excited about the prospect of buying the app from Facebook, just note that it will have until September 15th, which isn’t much time. Also, remember several high-profile acquisitions in Twitter ‘s history, including Vine and Periscope. Both were explosively popular-until Twitter acquired them.
