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Greetings! Donald Trump is president again, as of today! And in tech, among the most immediately affected will be viewers of the long-running drama “TikTok—Ban or Not?”. Trump on Sunday promised to renew the series for an expected three months. So far, Apple and Google don’t appear to be sticking around for the new season. While cloud service Oracle turned TikTok back on after a nearly 12-hour outage Sunday, the app remains unavailable in the Google and Apple mobile app stores. That could change, once Trump issues the TikTok executive order he has promised. Still, even if TikTok remains banned from the app stores, it may not matter too much. In the near term, the app's absence from app stores only affects those who don’t already have TikTok on their phones. Long term, existing users could find the app becoming glitchy, as it won’t be able to get updates. And if people change phones, they won’t be able to get TikTok on the new device. Still, by the time those issues become evident to many people, Trump’s extension of the deadline will likely be up. The real issue, then, is whether Trump the dealmaker can untangle this knot in the next three months. His opening gambit, that the U.S. will take a 50% stake in TikTok, was hard to interpret. Did he mean the U.S. government, or a U.S. company, maybe Elon Musk’s X, or a group of U.S. companies? Or maybe his own Truth Social? Perhaps, as my colleague Juro Osawa suggested to me, Trump could try to resurrect a deal similar to the one he was willing to approve in the waning days of his first term. That involved putting TikTok into a subsidiary that would be majority owned by U.S. investors. At least, that’s how potential participants described it at the time. The details were more complicated. The subsidiary was to be called TikTok Global. Oracle and Walmart were going to buy 20% of it, while ByteDance would own the other 80%. Because much of ByteDance’s stock is held by U.S. investors such as Susquehanna International Group and General Atlantic, this structure meant that indirectly U.S. investors would own more than half of TikTok Global. One problem with the 2020 proposal, as we said at the time, was that ByteDance would still have effective control of TikTok because the new entity would rely on ByteDance’s recommendation algorithm and the app’s existing teams would continue to work on the product. But if Trump is thinking of bringing back this idea, he could do it. He has the power under the act to determine whether any deal resolves the national security issues that led to the law. The question then is whether the Chinese would go for this arrangement. Back in 2020, they didn’t sound thrilled. Still, if TikTok gets tossed into a bigger negotiating pot also involving tariffs, you never know how things will work out. The next 90 days promise to be lots of fun. TikTok has officially gone full MAGA. On Sunday night, I attended a party in Washington sponsored by the ByteDance-owned video app on the eve of President Trump’s inauguration. The party had plenty of swag, ranging from TikTok beanies and earmuffs to stickers of Trump hugging and kissing an American flag with the text “Land That I Love.” Partygoers snapped pics next to life-size cutouts of Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and Elon Musk decked out in Western gear. Giant vertical screens around the party, which was put on to honor conservative influencers during the election, played TikToks from Trump’s account, as well as other clips from Republican voices. If you thought TikTok’s push notifications referencing Trump pandered too much to the president, last night’s party reached a new level. Above the bar, a large screen flashed several slides, including one thanking sponsors for the event. Another slide said “MAGA 2024.” Below the screen, revelers grabbed cocktails with napkins displaying a comment Trump made in December: “TikTok has a warm spot in my heart.”—Kaya Yurieff
- Instagram is creating a competitor to ByteDance’s CapCut video-creation and -editing app, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said on Sunday. The announcement of the new app, Edits, came after CapCut and TikTok, the larger ByteDance-owned app, shut off services for U.S. users late Saturday.
- Several tech luminaries, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew and Elon Musk, attended Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on Monday.
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