>Why Microsoft though, is there other company competing for the deal?

The only other companies, in tech, that could offer to pay 100B:

AAPL, MSFT, FB, AMZN, GOOG.

Once you exit FAAMG, the next largest company is Berkshire Hathaway with a 500B valuation. I don't see Buffet paying 1/5th of his own company for TikTok.

Among FAAMG, the other 4 just got grilled by Congress over Antitrust. FB & GOOG would likely never get approved it. I don't see AAPL owning a social network, given the privacy concerns around it. That leaves AMZN, who has Twitch as a "sister" platform. However I don't see Bezos getting away with acquiring a high profile company like TikTok, as he's currently enemy #1. That leaves MSFT who has been trying to get into social media but has kept failing (most recent of which was Mixer, which pretty much funneled millions into top streamers for nothing).

I kind of wonder about this. The US Government pours money on Microsoft. The number of Windows servers in government reels the mind, and of course every desktop is Windows, with Office. They previously acquired LinkedIn, which is where a huge number of US citizens, and particularly military folks, park their resumes and roledexes. The LinkedIn social graph essentially subtracts children and stay-at-home spouses, making it somewhat denser with the type of information a foreign government might be interested in. Similarly, GitHub is of huge US national, probably Western strategic interest.

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if some folks at Microsoft were "encouraged" to pursue those deals to keep them out of other hands.

Who else would/could buy it? I don't see Facebook or Google getting government approval. It doesn't seem like anything useful to Apple or Amazon.

Microsoft also has substantial Chinese operations (compared to other tech giants), so the Chinese government may have a preference to pressure Bytedance to sell to a relatively friendly company.