Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Microsoft has six weeks to close one of the strangest deals in tech industry history. On Sunday, the company publicly announced it was in talks with President ***** to buy portions of TikTok from its Chinese parent company ByteDance. For months, ***** has been raising national security concerns about TikTok, even threatening to ban the app, and now he’s presenting a sale to Microsoft as a last chance effort to save it. If the deal goes through, it would give Microsoft a new vantage on social networks and solve a variety of US national security concerns around TikTok’s newfound popularity.
But there’s a problem at the heart of the deal that no one on either side has addressed — and it’s serious enough to doom the entire project if it…