Donald Trump is a compulsive issuer of decrees: since January, there have been more than two hundred. Some are glorified press releases; Others are more important. “Save Tiktok while protecting national security” falls resolutely in the second category. Signed last week, the same day that the Ministry of Justice charged James Comey, it is designed to facilitate the transfer of a social platform with one hundred and sixty million American users to a consortium which includes several of the president’s political and financial benefits. According to reports, potential investors of the Tiktok agreement include two conservative billionaires – Larry Ellison, the co -founder of Oracle, and Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News – and two investment companies with links with the administration: Susquehanna, who already has a participation in the Chinese mother of Tiktok, detention; And Andreessen Horowitz. MGX, an investment fund supported by the Government of the United Arab Emirates, which recently deposited two billion dollars in crypto assets created by World Liberty Financial, recently deposited two billion dollars.
Maybe the moment of these developments was a coincidence, but it did not seem in this way. Indicating Comey and bring Tiktok’s American arm to the Maga The fold seems to be part of the same major project to concentrate the power of the media in the hands of Trump, or the hands of his allies, and to confuse his perceived enemies. Admittedly, the decree was signed a few days after Disney postponed the white house pressure campaign and restored Jimmy Kimmel in the air after a brief suspension. But, in today’s media ecosystem, end -of -evening comics on network television are nothing comparable to the reach of a social media giant like Tiktok.
The campaign to force Tiktok to give in its American operations began as a bipartite initiative motivated by ill -defined concerns that the application represented a threat to national security. Trump, towards the end of his first mandate, published an executive decree to prohibit the social platform for these reasons, but the courts have canceled it. When Joe Biden was in the White House, he officially canceled the ban on Trump but demanded a divestment. In 2024, the Congress adopted a bill, with the support of the two parties, which forced a sale or a closure of the application by January of this year. While campaigning for re -election, Trump used Tiktok to reach younger voters and changed his heart to ban it. Since arriving at the office, he has ignored the language of the 2024 legislation and has postponed the deadline four times. The agreement he finally developed to resolve the inspection of dead end mandates from all angles.
When a large company decides or is legally obliged to have one of its large subsidiaries, it normally hired an investment bank to find a buyer or buyers. This intermediary would then obtain financial and operational information on the company and would transmit it to potential bidders, in order to start an auction and the price as high as possible. The organization of an initial public offer of actions in the subsidiary would be another option. In this case, the law requiring disinvestment and the involvement of the Chinese government have complicated things. But we know not very precious on how the potential sale has been organized, that financial intermediaries have been involved or how the Ellison consortium was selected.
We know, in part because Trump said earlier this year, that at least four groups expressed their interest in the auctions. They included a framework led by billionaire Frank McCourt, who previously owned the Los Angeles Dodgers. In June, McCourt told the “CBS Mornings” that he and his partners had informed the office of the vice-president JD Vance that they were “ready, arranged and capable of buying the platform”. Other potential buyers would have included Amazon, the company of IA Perplexity, and a coalition led by Tim Stokely, the founder of Onlyfans. The decree that Trump has signed does not say what happened with other contenders, nor how the winning consortium was set up. He simply noted that Vance has led an inter -institutions process which determined that the proposed agreement was equivalent to a “qualified transfer” under the legislation of 2024. This inter -findings process involved not only the VANCE office, but the National Security Council, the Science and Technological Policy Office, the Ministry of the Treasury, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Commerce and the Office of the Director of National Information.
Last week, Trump said that the owners of Tiktok American operations would be “American investors, American companies, large investors”. He did not mention the investment company MGX, which is supported by the Emirati government and led by Sheikh Tahnoun Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, a Royal Emirati who is also the National Security Advisor of the Monarchy. When MGX bought two billion dollars in stablescoins issued by World Liberty Financial earlier this year, the purchase created Trump as a major player in the world of cryptography. And, like the Times Signed earlier this month, this decision came while water tried to buy thousands of advanced micropuits designed by the American company NVIDIA. The Trump administration then approved the purchase of fleas.
How did MGX appeared in the Tiktok transaction? This is another open question, as is the question of whether potential buyers get a romantic agreement. Last week, Vance said that the agreement would appreciate Tiktok American operations at fourteen billion dollars. It is much lower than previous estimates of its value, which varied up to fifty billion dollars. This “could be the most undervalued technological acquisition of the decade,” said Ashwin Binwani, the founder of an eponymous investment company in Bloomberg last week. However, another Bloomberg report provided a possible explanation for the low evaluation: even after the disinvestment agreement has been concluded, Bytedance will continue to receive around half of the profits that Tiktok generates in the United States, even if his participation will be reduced to twenty percent.
