Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation has moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas. Oracle became the latest technology company to leave California in the face of the state's higher taxes, steeper cost of living and a broader shift to remote work.
"We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work," spokesperson Deborah Hellinger told CNN Business.
TikTok will now have two more weeks, until Nov. 27, to reach an agreement with Oracle and Walmart and persuade the U.S. government to approve the proposed deal, a court filing on Friday showed. The company said on Tuesday that it requested an extension of 30 days to complete the sale but had not heard from the government for weeks.
Last October, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which investigates the national security risks of certain business deals, began examining ByteDance's 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly, a Chinese-owned lip-syncing app that became a hit among teens in the U.S. and would be relaunched as TikTok. The review came at the urging of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin raising fears about political censorship and the possibility that the Chinese Communist Party could use the app to advance its foreign policy agenda.
The U.S. Commerce Department on Saturday announced a one-week delay until September 27 on order to remove TikTok app from mobile application stores owned by Apple and Google. The decision came after President Trump has given tentative approval to an Oracle-Wallmart deal that will keep TikTok alive in the country.
Trump said, on Saturday, that "I have given the deal my blessing, I approve the deal in concept."
A revised term sheet by the United States Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchi has been accepted by Oracle and the TikTok owner Bytedance.
The approval of the United States and the Chinese governments are for the deal are still pending.
Oracle has confirmed that it has made a deal with ByteDance over a TikTok partnership, the company announced on Monday.
"Oracle confirms Secretary Mnuchin’s statement that it is part of the proposal submitted by ByteDance to the Treasury Department over the weekend in which Oracle will serve as the trusted technology provider," so Oracle in a statement.
"I will just say from our standpoint, we’ll need to make sure that the code is, one, secure, Americans’ data is secure, that the phones are secure and we’ll be looking to have discussions with Oracle over the next few days with our technical teams," so Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who said that the government is planning to review the deal this week.
ByteDance has decided to partner with Oracle on TikTok's U.S. operations instead of selling the U.S. arm. According to Reuters, the partnership is supposed to help navigate "geopolitical tensions between Beijing and Washington, people familiar with the matter said."
With Microsoft announcing that the U.S. operations of TikTok won't be sold to the technology company, rumours have broken out that Oracle will be the winner of the bid for the TikTok U.S. operations.
The Chinese state broadcaster CGTN has now reported that the TikTok owner ByteDance will sell its U.S. operations to neither Microsoft nor Oracle. ByteDance themselves refused to comment.
The United States President Donald Trump stated tech giant Oracle would be "a great company" to take over TikTok's US operations.
The President reaction comes days after media reported that Oracle would be a possible buyer of the TikTok in North America, Australia and New Zealand.
Trump ordered TikTok's owner ByteDance to sell their US business within 90 days or face being shut down by the government.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Oracle is working with Sequoia Capital and General Atlantic, investors that already have stakes in ByteDance.
Following a fundraiser for President Donald Trump, hosted by Oracle founder and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison, around 300 of his employees at Oracle stopped working out of protest at noon and spend the remaining day volunteering for good causes.