Microsoft Renews Its Pursuit Of TikTok After Talking With Trump

There’s still a chance that Microsoft
MSFT
could buy TikTok.

Talks between the tech giant and TikTok seemed dead in the water this weekend after President Trump told reporters he was planning to ban TikTok in America. But Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has since spoken to President Trump, and negotiations between Microsoft and Tiktok have resumed, according to a blog post published by Microsoft Sunday evening.

[Read more: Is this the real reason Trump wants to ban TikTok?]

Microsoft’s pursuit of TikTok leaked out Friday afternoon, and within hours after that, Trump seemed to indicate that a ban would come as quickly as Saturday. Trump and his officials have been weighing outright ban or possibly forcing TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell the social media, saying they fear that the Chinese company might be mishandling user data.

“Microsoft fully appreciates the importance of addressing the President’s concerns,” the blog post put out by Microsoft on Sunday reads. “It is committed to acquiring TikTok subject to a complete security review and providing proper economic benefits to the United States, including the United States Treasury.”

TikTok responded to the president’s comments on Friday with a boldly optimistic video message yesterday that it put on its platform and on Twitter. In it, TikTok’s Vanessa Pappas, the company’s U.S. general manager, cited TikTok’s 1,500 U.S. employees and it plans to hire as many as 10,000 workers in America. “We’re not planning on going anywhere,” Pappas says in the video.

TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, has taken steps over the past year to distance itself from its Chinese parent company. It has repeatedly said it wouldn’t—and doesn’t—share data with the Chinese government, and in May, it hired Disney
DIS
executive Kevin Mayer as its new CEO to give the business an American face.

Any sale to Microsoft would likely value TikTok well into the billions of dollars, and make Microsoft a surprising new challenger to Facebook, a departure from Microsoft’s years-long focus on enterprise software that has pushed its market valuation past $1 trillion for the first time.