Bill Gates is not optimistic about Microsoft’s acquisition of TikTok

U.S. President Trump has repeatedly attacked TikTok in the near future, repeatedly saying that TikTok will be completely banned in the United States. In fact, it was required that Bytedance or TikTok be sold to an American company or let TikTok withdraw from the US market.

The US government has contacted many US Internet companies regarding Trump’s request, including companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook, but Microsoft is the only company that remains at the negotiating table.

At present, the negotiations between Microsoft and Bytedance have entered a stage of substantive progress. The main focus is whether Bytedance wants to sell TikTok from several countries other than the United States to Microsoft.

Microsoft’s former CEO & largest shareholder, Steve Ballmer is very optimistic about Microsoft’s ongoing transaction. He said that it is very exciting news for Microsoft to acquire TikTok’s ownership in some markets.

But Microsoft founder Bill Gates has a completely different view from Ballmer. Bill Gates, who is now a Microsoft technical consultant, said in an interview with media about this incident that he thinks this transaction is for Microsoft. It is a “poisoned chalice”.

Bill Gates said that it is not easy to make the social media field bigger and stronger. The first issue is privacy. Every company that operates social media services needs to ensure that the communication between users is end-to-end encrypted, and at the same time ensure that the government cannot Obtain user information and session data, but the US government has always opposed Internet companies to do so.

In Bill Gates’ view, once Microsoft successfully acquires part of the market ownership of TikTok, then Microsoft will face stricter supervision by governments around the world, and this will definitely be detrimental to Microsoft’s future development.