The US House of Representatives is set to vote on the proposed bill this week. TikTok has criticized the legislation, stating it would strip 170 million Americans of their right to free expression and damage many businesses. Kotick, who was CEO of Activision from 1991 to 2008 and then Activision Blizzard after a merger, left the company in December following several scandals and a $69 billion acquisition by Microsoft.
Key takeaways:
- Former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick is reportedly interested in acquiring TikTok, amid US lawmakers proposing a bill that would require ByteDance to sell the app due to national security concerns.
- Kotick has reportedly expressed his interest to ByteDance executive chair Zhang Yiming, and the potential sale price could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
- Kotick also floated the idea of partnering to buy TikTok with a group that included Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which could use the app to help train its AI models.
- Kotick, who was CEO of Activision from 1991 until 2008 and then CEO of Activision Blizzard, left the company in December after Microsoft completed a $69 billion acquisition of the company.