US President Donald Trump said on Monday that the US government should get “a very large percentage” of the sale of video-sharing app TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, shortly after threatening to put the company “out of business” in the US if it is not sold by September 15, reported the South China Morning Post.
The cut “would come from the sale whatever that number is”, Trump at a White House briefing, without explaining how such an unprecedented payment could happen. The government “should get a very large percentage of that price because we’re making it possible. I use the expression it’s like the landlord and the tenant. And without the lease the tenant doesn’t have the value and what we’re sort of, in a certain way, ‘the lease’, we make it possible to have this great success” of TikTok. “I think it’s very fair,” he said.
“And we want no security problems with China. It’s got to be an American company, it’s got to be American securities, got to be owned here,” he added.
Earlier on Monday, Trump said that he was not opposed to Microsoft – or another US-based company – acquiring TikTok but that a sale had to take place by September 15.
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