Late Monday night aboard Air Force One, President Donald Trump told reporters that Microsoft is in discussions with the China-based tech giant ByteDance to acquire TikTok, according to a report from Bloomberg.

"I would say yes," Trump told reporters when asked if Microsoft would purchase the short video app used by more than 170 million Americans. 

The president continued, "A lot of interest in TikTok. There's great interest in TikTok."

Such a deal with Chinese owner ByteDance would avert a ban in the US. On Trump's first day in office, he signed an executive order extending the divest-or-ban deadline by 75 days. This extension gives ByteDance sufficient time to negotiate a deal with a US company. 

Last week, Trump told reporters he was open to X's Elon Musk or Oracle founder Larry Ellison purchasing TikTok. 

In recent days, AI startup Perplexity proposed a merger plan with TikTok, with the US government receiving half of the new company, a source told Reuters. 

Earlier Monday, Trump told House Republican leaders at the Trump National Doral just outside Miami that he previously pushed for a ban of the video app under national security grounds; however, he changed his mind due to pro-Trump content creators that flourished on the platform.

"We'll see what happens. We're going to have a lot of people bidding on it, and if we can save all that voice and all the jobs, and China won't be involved, we don't want China involved, but we'll see what happens," he told lawmakers, referring to TikTok. 

Trump noted, "I like bidding wars because you make your best deal. So if there's a bidding war, that's a good thing." 

And Microsoft confirmed. 

Shares of MSFT are muted in premarket trading in New York following the overnight report, as the DeepSeek AI fallout continues to overshadow the entire AI complex.