Bobby Kotick, former chief executive officer of videogame publisher Activision has expressed interest in buying the popular video content platform, TikTok. According to the WSJ, Bobby Kotick expressed interest to ByteDance co-founder, Zhang Yiming, according to a person familiar with the situation.
The estimated sum appears to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, the sources have said. The report also indicated that Kotick at a dinner at an Allen & Co. conference, earlier this week, Kotick floated the idea of partnering to buy TikTok to a table of people that included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Experts believe that OpenAI could use TikTok to help train its AI models if a partner such as Kotick could raise the capital for such an acquisition.
This is on the heels of a new legislation by the House of Representatives that will require Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok or face the app being banned from app stores and web-hosting services in the U.S.
This bill was motivated by the supposed threat that the app poses to US national security in the form of Chinese government spying efforts and access to US citizen’s data. By introducing the bill, the US government is hoping to prevent the capture of US data by the Chinese government as well as the spread of Chinese propaganda.
More on the US Government’s running battle with TikTok
The first push to force ByteDance to sell TikTok started from then-president Donald trump, Lawmakers have since banned TikTok from government-owned devices, but broader efforts were stalled by legal actions.
Subsequently, the Joe Biden administration officials seem to have concluded that TikTok still presents a threat to national security but are uncertain whether they had the legal authority to effectively ban the app or separate it from its Chinese owner. The new TikTok bill aims to give the White House clear authority.
TikTok has been in negotiations for several years with an executive-branch panel called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. over whether it can remain in the country, but it hasn’t reached an agreement.
On its part, TikTok has claimed that this step, if taken, will serve as an effective ban on its platform by the US authorities. With more than 170 million Americans, TikTok claims that separating the U.S. portion of its app wouldn’t be practical and would undercut the appeal of the content app, which is global.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee passed the bill known as the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” on the 7th of March. The House voted unanimously in favour of the bill, passing it 50–0.
The bill will go to the Senate for a floor vote as early as Wednesday, which will be the deciding factor given that President Joe Biden has repeatedly indicated his conviction about TikTok and has said that he would sign the bill immediately if it gets to his desk.
In contrast, some US senators have expressed concerns about attempts by Congress to ban the app. A bit about Bobby Kotick
Kotick was the CEO of Activision Blizzard for over 30 years. He became the CEO of Activision after purchasing a company stake the previous year. Kotick engineered a merger between Activision and Vivendi Games during the late 2000s, which led to the creation of Activision Blizzard in 2008 and him being named the company’s inaugural CEO.
He has also served on several boards, including The Coca-Cola Company from 2012 to 2022, and Yahoo! from 2003 to 2008. In June 2017, Fortune reported that Kotick had become “the longest-serving head of any publicly traded tech company.”
A sexual harassment and gender discrimination lawsuit in 2021 due to workplace misconduct and discrimination by several employees led to the end of his tenure in 2023. The lawsuit ended with a settlement fee of $50 million.
In the heat of this crisis, Microsoft made a $68.7 billion bid for Activision Blizzard. After intense scrutiny, regulators finally approved the deal in 2023.
