Amazon has put in a last-minute bid to buy TikTok as the April 5 deadline determining the popular video app’s fate quickly approaches.
Jeff Bezos’ e-commerce giant has joined an unnamed list of buyers that President Donald Trump has said are interested in acquiring the popular app.
In 2024, TikTok was the most popular app available and was downloaded 825 million times.
According to people familiar with the bid, Amazon sent its offer in a letter to Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, though allegedly none of the other potential buyers seem to be taking Amazon’s bid seriously.
“We have a lot of potential buyers,” Trump said on Air Force One Sunday. “There’s tremendous interest in TikTok… I’d like to see TikTok remain alive.”
The fate of the Chinese-owned app has been up in the air for months, but come Saturday, it will be determined whether or not the app will be banned in the U.S. or bought and separated from its owner, ByteDance.
After Trump took office Jan. 20, he signed an executive order that delayed enforcing the law by 75 days.
The president, who had previously spoken out against the app over national security concerns, said in December that he now has “a warm spot in my heart for TikTok,” accrediting it as having had an “impact” on young voters.
Bezos has been cozying up to the president ever since his second presidential victory, and was in attendance at Trump’s inauguration alongside the likes of Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
TikTok went dark for around 14 hours on Jan. 18 after the app lost an appeal to the Supreme Court that challenged Joe Biden’s divest-or-ban law. Biden signed a bill into law in 2024 requiring ByteDance to either sell TikTok’s controlling interest to a non-Chinese owner or get banned in the U.S. on Jan. 19.
At the time, the bill had received bipartisan congressional support.
Back in 2020, Microsoft and Walmart both made a bid for the company. The app has also caught the eye of billionaire Frank McCourt and the founder of the payroll firm Employer.com, Jesse Tinsley, but Amazon is the app’s most high-profile bidder.
Despite this looming deadline, TikTok has continued to say that it is not for sale, in part due to the Chinese government most likely blocking the deal.
Amazon already has some ties to TikTok, as influencers try and encourage their viewers to buy products off of Amazon in order to get a cut of the transactions. The app is used by around 170 million users in the U.S. alone and has become an important site for retail shopping.
TikTok also has its own e-commerce feature called TikTok Shop.
In the past, Amazon has also attempted to recreate TikTok’s short form video concept with a feature called Inspire on their mobile app, but media reports said last month that Amazon had already scrapped the idea.
