<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/12/19/tiktok-deal-done-and-its-somehow-the-shittiest-possible-outcome-making-everything-worse/>
"There were rumblings about this for a while, but it looks like the Trump
TikTok deal is done, and it’s somehow the
worst of all possible outcomes,
amazingly making all of the
biggest criticisms about TikTok significantly
worse. Quite an accomplishment.
The Chinese government has signed off on the deal, which involves offloading a
large chunk of TikTok to billionaire right wing Trump ally Larry Ellison (fresh
off his acquisition of
CBS), the private equity firm Silver Lake (which has
broad global investments in Chinese and Israeli hyper-surveillance), and MGX
(Abu Dhabi’s state investment firm), while still somehow having large
investment involvement by the Chinese:
“The new U.S. operations of TikTok will have three “managing investors” that
will collectively own 45 percent of the company: Oracle Corporation, Silver
Lake, and MGX. Another 5 percent will be owned by other new investors, 30.1
percent will be “held by affiliates of certain existing investors of
ByteDance; and 19.9 percent will be retained by ByteDance.”
There’s also a smattering 5% of investors that may or may not include folks
like right wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch. It’s worth noting that none of this
was really legal; the law technically stated that TikTok shouldn’t have been
allowed to exist for much of this year. Everyone just looked the other way
while Trump and his cronies repeatedly ignored deadlines and hammered away at
the transfer.
The deal purportedly involves “retraining the content recommendation algorithm
on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside
manipulation,” but given you can’t trust any of the companies involved, the
Trump administration, or what’s left of U.S. regulators, that means absolutely
nothing. Oracle will be “overseeing data protection,” but that means nothing as
well given Oracle is run by an authoritarian-enabling billionaire with a long
history of his own privacy abuses.
Also, this seems to ignore that three years ago, during the Biden
administration, it was already announced that Oracle was overseeing TikTok’s
algorithms and data protection. It’s kinda weird that everyone seems to have
forgotten that. This is all, more or less, what was already agreed to years
ago. Just shifting around the ownership structure to give Trump and his friends
a “win.”
It wasn’t subtle that the goal was always for Trump’s buddies to just basically
steal a big ownership chunk of a Chinese short form video company that U.S.
tech companies couldn’t out innovate. Offloading the company to his friends at
Oracle and Walmart was Trump’s stated goal during the first administration,
only thwarted because he lost the 2020 election. Everything else was
decorative."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
