A Deal with TikTok$14 Bi.Will Now Be Own By A Bunch of Different Evil Billionaires Incl Trump's Fam
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| The King Makes another Declaration, The time Social Media |
Lauren HirschTripp Mickle and Emmett Lindner
Republicans extreme and not so extreme talk about social media as the evil destroying the youth. Now that TikTok will be own by the evil and the Self serving Billionaires I have a feeling that clamor will be no more. I guess they think the Trump Fam is the good evil. My feelings, But lately after the last few shootings all I hear is the evil social media because the shooters had accounts in Social, mainly TikTok. Let Trump buy it even though he would deny it because it won't be him but Companies connected or own by his family, the same in my book. But if people get to know this maybe they will make TikTok the last place they want to use? I can dream.
President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that would help clear the way for a coalition of investors to run an American version of TikTok, one that is separate from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, so that it can keep operating in the United States.
The administration has been working for months to find non-Chinese investors for a U.S. TikTok company, which Vice President JD Vance said would be valued at $14 billion.
The deal is aimed at helping TikTok comply with a federal law, which banned the app in the United States in January out of concern that Beijing could use it to gain access to Americans’ sensitive data or to spread propaganda. Mr. Trump has delayed enforcement of the ban repeatedly. The Thursday order gives negotiators until mid-January to finalize the deal.
The White House hasn’t said exactly who would own the U.S. version of TikTok, but the list of potential investors includes several powerful allies of Mr. Trump. The software giant Oracle, whose co-founder is the billionaire Larry Ellison, will take a stake in U.S. TikTok. Mr. Trump has also said that the media mogul Rupert Murdoch is involved. A person familiar with the talks said the Murdoch investments would come through Fox Corporation.
And now, the Emirati investment firm MGX is expected to join the coalition, according to two people familiar with the talks — a surprise, since Mr. Trump said the new investors were “American investors, American companies, great ones, great investors.”
If it comes to fruition, a deal would lift a cloud of uncertainty that has dogged TikTok for years. Policymakers in Washington have long been concerned about the app’s ties to China, even as its American user base has skyrocketed to more than 170 million people. The lengthy tussle over the app’s future has concerned users and frustrated lawmakers.
The $14 billion valuation for TikTok is far lower than ByteDance’s valuation of $300 billion, according to the start-up tracker CB Insights.
The MGX investment is also the latest example of the Emiratis using their deep pockets to help Mr. Trump. In recent months, representatives of the Gulf State have pledged to invest $1.4 trillion in the U.S. economy over the next decade, and MGX has said it has deposited $2 billion in a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Trump family.
The TikTok talks and the MGX crypto investment played out as the Emiratis were pursuing a sale of valuable artificial intelligence chips. The Emiratis’ ability to buy the chips had been limited by the Biden administration over concerns about the Gulf State’s ties to China. But the Emiratis had been pressing the Trump administration to change U.S. policy so they could build data centers and become an A.I. powerhouse.
During Mr. Trump’s trip to Abu Dhabi in May, the administration agreed to sell the Emiratis 500,000 A.I. chips for a data center campus that would be among the largest in the world.
MGX has been discussing the TikTok investment for months, according to two people familiar with the talks. It was one of several companies in the TikTok deal that stood to benefit from the Emiratis’ data center project. Oracle will be building a data center that will cost about $20 billion in the Emirates. Silver Lake, an investment company, has a stake in one of the partners in that project, G42, an Emirati A.I. company.
While there is no evidence that the chip deal was offered in return for any other transactions, two Democratic senators have asked inspectors general at the Commerce and State Departments to investigate whether Trump administration officials violated ethic rules in the multibillion-dollar deals involving the Emiratis.
The executive order describes a deal that calls for ByteDance to license its algorithm to a new American TikTok company controlled by a coalition of non-Chinese investors. Together, those investments would help dilute ByteDance’s Chinese ownership to below 20 percent to satisfy the law’s requirements.
Oracle, MGX, and the investment firm Silver Lake would together control roughly 45 percent of the company, according to the two people familiar with the talks. Other investors are likely to take smaller stakes, the people said. According to Mr. Trump, Michael Dell, the chief executive of the computer maker Dell Technologies, is on that list. The plan is for Oracle to protect U.S. user data.
MGX, Oracle and Silver Lake did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Fox Corporation and BDT & MSD Partners, a Dell-backed investment firm, declined to comment.
Mr. Trump has said that China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has signed off on the framework for a deal. A readout of the call from a Chinese state-run news agency was more vague, but Mr. Xi appeared to support a commercial solution to TikTok.
The federal law concerning TikTok gives the president the power to determine whether any deal counts as a “qualified divestiture” that meets its terms. His executive order on Thursday declares that the investor coalition framework satisfies it.
“It will be majority-owned and controlled by United States persons and will no longer be controlled by any foreign adversary, since ByteDance Ltd. and its affiliates will own less than 20 percent of the entity, with the remainder being held by certain investors,” the order reads.
But the plan has been questioned in Washington. John Moolenaar, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on China, said in a social media statement that the licensing arrangement raised concerns because it suggested the new TikTok could allow China to have continued “control or influence.”
Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who is focused on U.S.-China relations, said the White House’s executive order would stoke those questions only because it says “the divestiture includes intense monitoring of software updates, algorithms and data flows.”
“If you control it, why would you need intense monitoring to know what’s happening with it?” Mr. Sobolik said. “Monitoring the algorithm is not the same controlling it. That’s the head fake the administration appears to be trying to pull here.”
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