Unbelievable news is bouncing around the internet from the columns of the Wall Street Journal: after leaving Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick is apparently looking for international investors to attempt a takeover of TikTok and take over ownership of the social media giant.
The powerful political and bureaucratic machine that has been set in motion in the United States to ban TikTok due to the risks and concerns deriving from Chinese propaganda is about to reach its final stage, i.e. the vote in the House after months of negotiations and discussions that would happening behind the scenes on Capitol Hill.
The bill preliminarily approved by the US House Energy and Commerce Committee with a unanimous vote of the participants in the extraordinary session is thus pushing several entrepreneurs to come forward to take over ownership of TikTok and, in doing so, allow it to remain on mobile stores in the United States.
While waiting for the bill to be submitted to the Senate for judgement, Bobby Kotick would also be among the hi-tech giants and large investors who could be interested in the acquisition of TikTok: according to what was claimed by the WSJ journalists, the former CEO of the Activision Blizzard King group would have contacted the executive president of ByteDance Zhang Yiming to express your interest in take over TikTok together with a group of international entrepreneurs and further unspecified investorsdue to the large sums of money needed to acquire the social network giant (with an estimated value in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars).
The former Activision boss, therefore, is currently looking for partners. The Wall Street Journal's anonymous sources cite the CEO at OpenAI Sam Altman among the people contacted by Kotick to start this multibillion-dollar deal: according to the former Activision exponent, Altman could use TikTok to train new artificial intelligence models based on OpenAI technologies.