- According to a New York Times report, one of the people in the running for the job of TikTok CEO is Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom
As TikTok and Oracle are working out an acquisition contract, the social media firm is also thinking about who will be their next CEO after the departure of their last president, Kevin Mayer, after a few months.
According to a New York Times report, one of the people in the running for the job is Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, who quit Facebook in 2018. Systrom and Tiktok’s talks are still in the early stages, notes the Times. For this article, TikTok could not be reached for comment. A Systrom spokesperson declined to comment.
The divestiture of TikTok from its Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance remains very much a work underway. This afternoon, Bloomberg has announced that the U.S. An agreement that would leave TikTok’s U.S. operations primarily in the hands of American stakeholders, including Oracle, has been tentatively accepted by Treasury. ByteDance also needs to get President Trump’s approval by Sunday, the day a Trump-issued executive order comes into force that would essentially ban TikTok in the US.
When his hiring was announced in May, Mayer was seen as a good pick. He’d spent years managing his M&A transactions at Disney DIS and working on releasing his streaming service, Disney+. But Mayer departed abruptly last month, saying that he had not intended to be caught up in tensions between the U.S. and China. TikTok’s general manager, Vanessa Pappas, served as TikTok’s interim president.
In Systrom, TikTok will get someone who has already created one giant in social media — and someone who is immensely familiar with one of the biggest rivals of TikTok: Mark Zuckerberg.
In 2012, Systrom sold Instagram for nearly $ 1 billion to Zuckerberg and Facebook and built it up to over half a billion users before leaving.
Zuckerberg and Facebook already clearly see TikTok as a threat. Instagram has rolled out a range of new features to imitate TikTok like a short-form video editing tool and has updated its main feed to make it more like TikTok. Zuckerberg reportedly emphasized to politicians in Washington that TikTok was a danger to American users; Trump and other Republicans expressed fear that TikTok might mishandle user data to appease the Chinese government.
Add Systrom to the mix and the fight between TikTok and Facebook is becoming one of the corporate world’s most fascinating rivalries.
It will be very amusing to see how this shapes up in the US as Systrom has in and out idea of functioning of the giant he has created and if he joins TikTok, it will be another brand battle on the showcase.
