The ownership of the company is irrelevant, it's who has control of the algorithm and where the data flows. If Tiktok US licenses the algorithm from China (which seems likely) then none of the national security issues are addressed.
A huge shame it'll be undone in 24 hours. Shouting out Trump by name in the ban message is hilarious, they are really doing their best to tie his hands.
Not too hard to understand. He sensed he had leverage based on national security concerns to dangle a sword above their heads. One of their investors donated a bunch of money to help get him re-elected, so now he will reverse his earlier position based on some other pretext. It’s all theater.
> * Dems pickup where republicans left off and ban TikTok
So why didn't Biden stop the ban? Instead he signed it and did not intervene. The problem is Biden continued and did not stop it they left Trump to reverse the ban.
It would have been better for the clean up his own mess but again they allowed Trump to "save them" and Biden would have just left TikTok for dead.
Not bizarre at all. Trump doesn’t need to ever acknowledge that he’s the one who made that initial move. Just take credit for saving it now.
Maybe if he’s feeling himself he’ll say it was a 4D chess move to make Biden look like a bozo by being the one to ban it just for him to swoop in and undo the ban in 48 hours.
It’s impossible to gotcha a guy who pretends the past never happened — or who insists that his imagination of the past is accurate.
Exactly. That and trying to bury the lede about the Biden Administration's role in the Gaza ceasefire would send a signal to a huge chunk of voters alienated from the Democratic Party that the Republicans care about them. I'm afraid (though unsure how realistic my fear is) that a enough GenZ and anti-Gaza voters will flip to Trump if Trump keeps TikTok going that the Democrats won't be able to win in the midterms.
A lot of the anti-TikTok sentiment seems to revolve around the mores of college-educated, upper-middle-class white GenX and Millenial mores, which the Republicans have gleefully used as punching bags.
Democrats getting trounced by Trump/Republican Party is one of the most embarrassing things to ever happen to the Democratic Party and that is saying something.
If they lose (again) it won’t be because of TikTok. No place left to look but in the mirror.
> I'm afraid (though unsure how realistic my fear is) that a enough GenZ and anti-Gaza voters will flip to Trump if Trump keeps TikTok going that the Democrats won't be able to win in the midterms.
There are about 10 million news cycles between now and the midterms, highly unlikely anyone will remember any of this by then.
Gen Z voters are also young, and young people never vote.
He lives to take credit for moments like this. One can only wonder what his actions will be conditional on, but it’s a virtual certainty that it will need to benefit him personally.
He said so himself. "Trump told the court that TikTok was an important platform for his presidential campaign and that he should be the one to make the call on whether TikTok should remain in the US—not the Supreme Court.":
That doesn't really help here. TikTok is at an absolute minimum an order of magnitude more valuable than Perplexity, more likely two orders of magnitude. If ownership of NewCo was even roughly proportional to the market value each side is bringing, the ownership structure doesn't meaningfully change compared to TikTok.
And when the ownership structure is the problem, it's obvious that this deal structured as a merger would solve nothing. They'd need to bring a couple of hundred billion to the table; and then we're back to this being just embarrassing, because obviously the money isn't there.
> TikTok is at an absolute minimum an order of magnitude more valuable than Perplexity, more likely two orders of magnitude
They don't need to buy TikTok, they need to buy out Bytedance.
If I had to structure it, I'd have Bytedance spin out TikTook to its U.S. shareholders and then arrange for Perplexity to buy enough of Bytedance's share that Bytedance holds a 49% (non-voting) interest.
> Bytedance without TikTok is still an order of magnitude worth more than Perplexity
They’re not buying Bytedance - TikTok, they’d be buying half of the piece of TikTok Bytedance would own after spinning it out to its non-Chinese shareholders.
The point still stands, they don't have enough of a relative valuation to even be considered serious and a balance sheet that would be a rounding error to ByteDance.
