Apple says there are no talks to buy TikTok, and it isn't interested, after sources said it is among the companies that have expressed interest in buying TikTok
In August 2020 TikTok sat at the center of Washington's divest-or-ban fight, and Axios had reported that Apple was among the companies expressing interest in buying it. Apple's flat denial matters because it came while ByteDance was already sketching a standalone US-based TikTok company with minority shareholders to satisfy regulators.
The denial also frames how the saga eventually resolved: no consumer-hardware giant stepped in, and five years later the structure that stuck was an Oracle-led investor group with Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi's MGX taking the main stake. The through-line is the one laid out in the earlier regulatory-model debate — deal terms being dictated by policy pressure rather than buyer strategy.
First-order effects
Apple exits the list of plausible buyers entirely, leaving the field to financial investors and infrastructure-adjacent players like Oracle rather than another Big Tech platform.
Second-order effects
With a marquee tech acquirer off the table, ByteDance's fallback — carving TikTok into a US-domiciled company with institutional minority owners — becomes the realistic path, as later borne out by the Oracle-Silver Lake-MGX consortium.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, forced divestitures become the template for how politically sensitive foreign-owned apps get restructured in the US: ownership decided by regulator-approved consortiums of finance and infrastructure firms, not by competing platforms.
The trend: US political pressure, not strategic appetite among Big Tech buyers, is what determines which investors end up owning TikTok's American operations.
State of play: Apple spokesperson tells Axios that there are no discussions about buying TikTok and the company isn't interested. Should note that multiple sources confirm Apple's expressions of interest.
China has banned google, twitter, Facebook etc, yet we accept Huawei and Tiktok. What is it that the Trudeau government doesn't understand? We need to stop the free ride for China's Communist Party. https://globalnews.ca/...
If everyone who is concerned about the Chinese Gov't and TikTok would start paying attention to how Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have been mining their data, and how the US Gov't has been warrantlessly spying on them for years... that would be great.
BREAKING: in a move likely to further increase US-China tensions, Beijing announced that any attempt to ban Tiktok or WeChat in the US would result in bans on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Youtube, Instagram, Tumbler, NY Times, Washington Post, and of course Pinterest in the PRC htt…
The “Business President” has now publicly claimed that the US treasury should get a cut from the potential sale of a private company. Just like the “China pays the tarrifs” lie that he's been milking for years, THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS. https://www.reuters.com/...
The former head of Google's Chinese operations added that while Google was forced to leave China, Beijing had always been clear about its restrictions while Trump lacked a legal basis to bar TikTok.