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- Satya Nadella said Microsoft's attempted purchase of TikTok's US operations was the "strangest thing" he's worked on.
- President Donald Trump ordered TikTok to sell its US operations to an American firm in August 2020.
- Nadella said the government lost interest in a deal between Microsoft and TikTok parent ByteDance.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company's failed attempt to buy TikTok's US operations was "the strangest thing" he's ever worked on.
President Donald Trump ordered TikTok's parent company ByteDance to sell its TikTok US operations to an American company in August 2020, citing concerns over ByteDance's links to Beijing. Microsoft announced it was pursuing an acquisition on August 2, but then said on September 13, 2020, that the deal had fallen through.
During an interview at the Code tech conference on Monday, as reported by CNBC and The Verge, Nadella said TikTok had initially approached Microsoft about the planned sale. "TikTok was caught in between a lot of issues that they were having across two capitals, and they wanted to partner," Nadella said, per CNBC.
He added that the US government lost interest in the deal. "There was a period of time when I thought the [US government] had a particular set of requirements, [but] it just disappeared," Nadella said, per The Verge.
"President Trump I think had a particular point of view of what he was trying to get done," but this "just dropped off," Nadella added, per The Verge.
After Microsoft failed to buy TikTok's US operations, ByteDance struck a deal with Oracle, but walked away in February 2021 once the Biden administration was in control, The South China Morning Post reported at the time.
In June 2021, President Joe Biden rescinded a Trump-era executive order banning TikTok along with Chinese app WeChat. Trump's so-called TikTok ban had already been blocked by a federal judge in November 2020.
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