Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) helped to push a bill into law last year that forces TikTok’s owner, the Chinese company ByteDance, to sell the app or be banned in the United States. Now, Gottheimer is loading up on millions of dollars in stock options in Microsoft, his former employer, as the tech giant is in talks to buy TikTok.
According to a stock transaction disclosure released on March 7, Gottheimer and his spouse bought and sold millions of dollars worth of Microsoft stock options last month. While the values of the transactions are only provided in broad ranges, it appears they bought more than they sold. The value of their Microsoft options purchases in February was between $3.5 million and $16 million, and the value of the sales that month was between $2.7 million and $11.5 million.
In March 2024, Gottheimer co-introduced bipartisan legislation to force a sale of TikTok, which he said was being leveraged by the Chinese Communist Party to undermine American democracy. The measure was signed into law by President Biden in April 2024 as part of a foreign aid bill for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
Upon taking office again, President Trump signed an executive order pausing the TikTok ban and setting a new April 5 deadline to find a buyer for the app. In January, Trump said that Microsoft was in talks to buy TikTok—it had been a leading contender to acquire TikTok in 2020, after Trump called the app a national security threat. In addition to Microsoft, several groups of investors and the search engine Perplexity AI are reportedly placing bids. Trump recently told a press gaggle that his administration is working with “four different groups” on negotiations.
Closing a deal to own TikTok, with about 170 million U.S. users, would give Microsoft a marquee app to rival social media giants like Google's YouTube and Meta's Facebook.
