UPDATE: Late Friday, President Donald Trump said he would extend TikTok’s deadline to find a buyer another 75 days.

Amazon.com Inc. has entered the TikTok sweepstakes. The e-commerce powerhouse reportedly made a last-minute bid to buy the video-sharing app from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, ahead of a U.S. ban on the platform set to go into effect Saturday.

Representatives from Amazon submitted an offer letter to Vice President JD Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to a New York Times report Wednesday, although those close to negotiations said Amazon’s bid was not being treated “seriously,” the newspaper reported. Oracle Corp. and private equity firm Blackstone Inc. are also considered potential suitors.

Details of a dollar offer were not revealed, but TikTok is expected to fetch at least $40 billion.

While some industry followers initially questioned the wisdom of a non-social-media company acquiring one of the largest, Mundial Media CEO Tony Gonzalez said the combination of Amazon and TikTok “could mark a new era in how commerce, content, and advertising converge.”

Like others, he sees Amazon’s move as a fascinating strategic play that showcases how the lines between e-commerce and social media continue to blur in the evolution of digital marketplaces.

“While this move would expand Amazon’s footprint in the creator economy, it also highlights the growing importance of independent platforms and the open web. Advertisers will need to balance the scale of closed ecosystems with the agility and cultural relevance offered by partners across the open internet,” Gonzalez said in an email.

“Amazon has been unsuccessfully searching for ways to bridge social media and commerce for years. Being able to merge the platform and its social commerce capabilities with its marketplace and retail media capabilities might be the perfect way for the company to create a self-contained shopping and entertainment ecosystem that becomes an ad revenue cash cow,” added Greg Zakowicz, senior ecommerce expert at Omnisend.

Amazon’s bid surfaced as President Donald Trump was scheduled to meet with senior officials Wednesday to discuss TikTok’s future. Under federal law, ByteDance is required to either sell the wildly popular platform to an approved buyer or shut it down nationwide. The Federal Communications Commission and FBI have warned ByteDance can share the data of its 170 million American users — their browsing history, location and biometric identifiers — with the authoritarian Chinese government. TikTok insists it has not done so nor ever would.

Still, the state of the app has been in limbo since last year, when then-President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation on a potential ban.

Trump, who has several million followers on TikTok, delayed a national ban once before via executive order, but is not expected to do so again. Indeed, Vance told NBC News that while the contours of a TikTok deal could be in place by the deadline, the finer points might take longer to iron out.

Analysts, too, are betting the app will stay up and running, given its widespread use in the U.S.