Trump pushing Microsoft to purchase TikTok was ‘strangest thing I’ve ever labored on,’ says Satya Nadella

It’s troublesome to recollect now, however in August 2020 there was a deeply surreal episode whereby Microsoft proposed buying some portion of TikTok in an advanced deal because the Trump administration was threatening to come back down exhausting on the platform. Ultimately, TikTok turned Microsoft down only a day earlier than Oracle got here in with a completely totally different form of deal and the entire thing dissipated.

Speaking as we speak at the Code Conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella mentioned the entire ordeal was the “strangest thing I’ve ever sort of worked on.”

In phrases of the worth of such a deal for Microsoft, Nadella mentioned he “was kind of intrigued by it,” earlier than attempting to maneuver proper together with fun, deadpanning after a pause “and then I guess the rest is history.”

Kara Swisher pressed him for the story and Nadella, clearly nonetheless a little bit agog on the strangeness, walked via a number of of the important thing steps. The necessary begin is that “TikTok came to us, we didn’t come to TikTok,” he says. The firm was searching for a US accomplice to assist with “these security things we seem to [have been] hearing about.”

Nadella thought TikTok may need been a great match as a result of it was a social, cloud-based service that closely leveraged AI, all areas of focus for the corporate. “It is an interesting product,” he says.

Nadella’s competition is that Microsoft would have been an fascinating accomplice for TikTok due to its established work with “investments in social media, in particular what we’re doing in content moderation and child safety.” Those strengths — plus the important thing proven fact that it’s a US-based cloud companies supplier — have been seen to be key to assuaging the Trump administration.

“There was a period of time when I though the the [US government] had a particualr set of requirements, [but] it just disappeared,” Nadella says. “President Trump I think had a particular point of view of what he was trying to get done …and then just dropped off.”

“At this point, it’s all moot, right?” Nadella says. He says he hasn’t adopted up on what’s occurring with TikTok and Oracle (Hint: it’s been shelved indefinitely.) Would he like to purchase TikTok now if it got here again on the desk? “No,” Nadella says, “at this point I’m happy with what I have.”