Ex-Google CEO Schmidt says he considered buying TikTok
- A new federal law requires TikTok to be sold by its parent, ByteDance, within a year or face a ban in the US
- Schmidt said he views the app as more akin to television than social media, and that he hoped the US would consider regulating it as such
Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, said he had explored a possible purchase of TikTok, but has moved on from the idea of trying to acquire the popular video-sharing app from its Chinese owners.
A new federal law requires TikTok to be sold by its parent, ByteDance, within a year or face a ban in the US. Schmidt, who ran Alphabet’s Google for over a decade, confirmed on Tuesday that he at one point considered purchasing the platform – though he added that it is no longer on the table.
“I’m not currently looking at that,” Schmidt said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “I looked at it for a while.” He added that his personal view was that the US would be better off regulating TikTok, rather than banning it or having the app be subject to judicial action.
ByteDance is unlikely to sell off the core technology that determines what people see in their feeds, an algorithm that has propelled TikTok to more than 170 million monthly US users. The Chinese government would have to sign off on any such deal, leaving some to speculate that a buyer would seek to acquire the American operations and users – but not the tech that underpins the app.
Recreating the algorithm would be difficult and expensive. Since TikTok rose in popularity during the pandemic for giving users an automatically curated feed of videos, tech giants like Meta Platforms and Alphabet have spent years to try to duplicate the experience to varying degrees of success.