Could Twitter Outbid Microsoft for TikTok? (reuters.com) 21
An anonymous reader quotes Reuters:
Twitter has approached TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance to express interest in acquiring the U.S. operations of the video-sharing app, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters, as experts raised doubts over Twitter's ability to put together financing for a potential deal.
It is far from certain that Twitter would be able to outbid Microsoft and complete such a transformative deal in the 45 days that U.S. President Donald Trump has given ByteDance to agree to a sale, the sources said on Saturday. The news of Twitter and TikTok being in preliminary talks and Microsoft still being seen as the front-runner in bidding for the app's U.S. operations was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal. Twitter has a market capitalization of close to $30 billion, almost as much as the valuation of TikTok's assets to be divested, and would need to raise additional capital to fund the deal, according to the sources. "Twitter will have a hard time putting together enough financing to acquire even the U.S. operations of TikTok. It doesn't have enough borrowing capacity", said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan....
One of Twitter's shareholders, private equity firm Silver Lake, is interested in helping fund a potential deal, one of the sources added. Twitter has also privately made a case that its bid would face less regulatory scrutiny than Microsoft's, and will not face any pressure from China given that it is not active in that country, the sources said.
It is far from certain that Twitter would be able to outbid Microsoft and complete such a transformative deal in the 45 days that U.S. President Donald Trump has given ByteDance to agree to a sale, the sources said on Saturday. The news of Twitter and TikTok being in preliminary talks and Microsoft still being seen as the front-runner in bidding for the app's U.S. operations was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal. Twitter has a market capitalization of close to $30 billion, almost as much as the valuation of TikTok's assets to be divested, and would need to raise additional capital to fund the deal, according to the sources. "Twitter will have a hard time putting together enough financing to acquire even the U.S. operations of TikTok. It doesn't have enough borrowing capacity", said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan....
One of Twitter's shareholders, private equity firm Silver Lake, is interested in helping fund a potential deal, one of the sources added. Twitter has also privately made a case that its bid would face less regulatory scrutiny than Microsoft's, and will not face any pressure from China given that it is not active in that country, the sources said.
Vine (Score:3)
The value is users open the Tik Tok app (Score:3)
The value is in the users. It would take about a day for me set up a server that stores short videos that usea posts, and has a database for users. The next day my buddy could make an app that plays the videos. Total value of a copy of Tik Tok - about $300.
Sure Twitter or anyone else could have service kinda like Too Tok, but what good is that?
The value of Tik Tok is that today 150 million people are going to open the app and use Tik Tok. This month, twice that many. That's the value, the customer base
Re: (Score:2)
Presumably they killed it off because they couldn’t make it profitable.
This isn’t exactly an ad rich era at this point. So, exactly why would they relaunch vine?
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https://www.theverge.com/2016/... [theverge.com]
There's a nice writeup about it right here.
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Two useless time wasting pieces of crap, sounds like a match made in heaven.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry if my attention span, which extends to collections of written words as long as entire textbooks, offends you.
Instagram and Snapchat will kill TikTok (Score:3)
Once Instagram and Snapchat start providing the same service their network effect will steal TikTok's users.
Great idea! (Score:4, Funny)
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Twitter and TikTok have more in common than w/MSFT (Score:1)
Not sure Microsoft is going to help anything. Business staples aside, Microsoft habitually fails to get what makes a product cool, and it shows in the stagnation of their purchased products (Hotmail, Skype). Maybe they do too much by committee, maybe they release buggy/inferior products because it's written by inte
Re: (Score:3)
Not only is Microsoft very good at making something uncool, even if it was cool before, they're prone to kill it after a while. Which might be their actual goal anyways, they don't like killer apps on a competing platform.
For Twitter however, social media is core business. Now, Twitter not being very good at their core business and getting criticized a lot for their judgements, surely they would do a hell of a lot better than Microsoft.
As for business, they seem to love video so a video platform sounds as i
Considering... (Score:2)
Considering what a huge piece of collective shit Jack and Twitter are, I hope for the sake of youngsters everywhere that Microsoft ends up with TikTok and not Twitter.