Amazon, OnlyFans founder in bids for TikTok
An 11th-hour pitch has been put forward ahead of a ban on social media platform, TikTok in the United States.
Amazon has put in a bid to buy TikTok, a local administration official says, as the social media platform faces a ban in the United States.
The official, who was not authorised to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Amazon offer was made in a letter to US Vice President JD Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
The New York Times first reported on the bid.
A startup run by Tim Stokely, founder of adult content social media site OnlyFans, said on Wednesday (US time) it had partnered with a cryptocurrency foundation to submit its own plan to acquire TikTok.
The intent to bid was sent this week to the White House by Zoop, billionaire Stokely’s new company, and the Hbar Foundation, which manages the Hedera cryptocurrency network’s treasury.
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While OnlyFans is known mainly for pornography, Zoop is mainstream and family-friendly. It gives back the majority of its revenue to those who post on the site, rewarding them for driving up user engagement.
“Our bid for TikTok isn’t just about changing ownership, it’s about creating a new paradigm where both creators and their communities benefit directly from the value they generate,” Zoop co-founder RJ Phillips told Reuters.
The partners have been working with a consortium of investors, Phillips said.
He declined to provide details on the bid or the investors backing it.
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US President Donald Trump gave TikTok a reprieve on his inauguration day, barrelling past a law that had been upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court, which said the ban was necessary for national security.
Under the law, TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance is required to sell the platform to an approved buyer or take it offline in the US.
Trump has suggested he could further extend the pause on the ban but he has also said he expects a deal to be forged by Saturday.
Amazon declined to comment.
The existence of an Amazon bid surfaced as Trump was scheduled on Wednesday to meet senior officials to discuss the looming deadline for a TikTok sale.
Both the FBI and the US Federal Communications Commission have warned that ByteDance could share user data – such as browsing history, location and biometric identifiers – with China’s authoritarian government.
TikTok said it has never done that and would not do so if asked.
The US government has provided no evidence of it happening.
Trump has millions of followers on TikTok and has credited the trendsetting platform with helping him gain traction among young voters.
During his first term, he took a more sceptical view of TikTok and issued executive orders banning dealings with ByteDance as well as the owners of the Chinese messaging app WeChat.
