It’s hard to recollect now, yet in August 2020 there was a profoundly strange scene wherein Microsoft proposed securing some part of TikTok in a complicated deal as the Trump organization was taking steps to drop the hammer on the stage. Ultimately, TikTok turned Microsoft down just a day before Oracle came in with a unique sort of deal and the entire thing was disseminated.

Talking today at the Code Conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the entire experience was the “most peculiar thing I’ve ever kind of dealt with.”

As far as the worth of such an arrangement for Microsoft, Nadella said he “was somewhat fascinated by it,” before attempting to move directly alongside a giggle, deadpanning after stopping for a moment “and afterward I surmise the rest is history.”

Kara Swisher squeezed him for the story and Nadella, obviously still somewhat agog at the oddness, strolled through a couple of the key stages. The significant beginning is that “TikTok came to us, we didn’t come to TikTok,” he says. The organization was searching for a US accomplice to assist with “these security things we appear to [have been] finding out about.”

Nadella figured TikTok may have been a solid match since it was a social, cloud-based help that intensely utilized AI, all spaces of concentration for the organization. “It is an intriguing item,” he says.

Nadella’s conflict is that Microsoft would have been a fascinating accomplice for TikTok in light of its set up work with “interests in web-based media, specifically the thing we’re doing in content balance and kid security.” Those qualities — in addition to the key reality that it is a US-based cloud administrations supplier — supposedly were critical to alleviating the Trump organization.

“There was a timeframe when I however the [US government] had a specific arrangement of prerequisites, [but] it recently vanished,” Nadella says. “President Trump I think had a specific perspective of what he was attempting to finish …and afterward dropped off.”

TikTok ultimately let Microsoft know that it wouldn’t be pushing ahead with the arrangement in September. Later in the year, days in front of a cutoff time Trump set for parent organization ByteDance to auction its US resources, TikTok suggested the organization had overlooked the boycott inside and out. President Biden ultimately revoked the request this year.

“Now, everything’s disputable, right?” Nadella says. He says he hasn’t circled back to what’s new with TikTok and Oracle. (Clue: it’s been shelved endlessly.) Would he get a kick out of the chance to purchase TikTok now on the off chance that it returned on the table? “No,” Nadella says, “now I’m content with what I have.”