Trump's favorite tech company could win TikTok | Hacker News Reader

Trump's favorite tech company could win TikTok

axios.com

20 points0xedb23 comments

I can't think of a faster way to kill a trendy app's popularity than getting bought by Oracle.

At least the user base for this app's reaction will be "Who?" rather than the more appropriate "We should leave. Now."

They'd probably keep the majority of users by leading with "from the company who brought you Minecraft's Java"

As a member of Gen Z, I doubt my generation would care very much.

The question is how Oracle would monetize TikTok. Right now the only modes of monetization for the app are ads on app launch and sponsored challenges.

I immediately stumbled upon Facebook but it seems not (Instagram is still popular).

It would be hilarious and speak to the dysfunction of every part of this situation if Oracle ended up owning tiktok.

It really isn't hilarious. This is how the US loses its long-term reputation as a level playing field for business, a great place to work/set up shop, etc.

This whole process has been unbelievable. The president dusts off some obscure law to ban or block tiktok. Now a forced sale is about to happen and the administration gets a say in who buys it? And they want some kind of finder's fees!?

This stuff isn't supposed to happen in the US! We aren't Zimbabwe, with a dictator who runs around with suitcases full of cash making no compunction about awarding contracts to people closest to him! This is major, high-level corruption! Are we going to start judging other M&A deals by who donates the most to a campaign?

This whole thing is just a huge, stinking, disorderly mess. We can't decide whether we're going to ban Huawei or not. Then the whole mess with ZTE. Now Tiktok. It's capricious and corrosive to the rule of law. And what's worse, not only is it ham-fisted, but this administration makes such a big deal out of "freedom", when having a president stepping in like this is anything BUT freedom -- it is the very antithesis of it, where winners and losers are decided based on personal favorites?

On one hand, yes, this could indicate some kind of breakdown in the rule of law (not TikTok being sold to Oracle, but TikTok being forced to sell). What you need to consider is:

1. Is it a threat that this happens to you, as a non-CCP sponsored entity?

2. Is it likely that you will ever even be large enough to care about?

I'm not sure I can agree with the exact methods undertaken against TikTok/ByteDance, but I think most people who care can realize this is only happening because of TikTok's position and perceived (and likely real) Chinese agression.

This is major, high-level corruption!

It's not. The CCP is not playing by the rules. It's not a recent thing. It's been going on for ages. Stop defending CCP companies. We're not talking about EU, Japan, Indian, Australian, etc. companies. Stop conflating this with lack of freedom.

If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at the CCP and their absolute disdain for the rules by which everyone is playing.

We can't decide whether we're going to ban Huawei or not.

Of course we can. It's another CCP tool. We ban it. That's it.

This whole thing is just a huge, stinking, disorderly mess.

Only because you chose to make everything related to Trump a mess. Remove Trump from the equation, judge those companies for what they are: the leading edge in CCP cyberwarfare and espionage,

> Of course we can. It's another CCP tool. We ban it. That's it.

This is how to conflict quickly.

We are at conflict already. It's not standard engagement. It's not even Cold War engagement (yet). But there's definitely a war being fought in some fronts. Propaganda and economy, among others. And Huawei/ZTE/TikTok are the tip of the spear.

We may as wait for another 40 years till the CCP is prepared enough so no one can stop them.

E.g. https://kprcradio.iheart.com/featured/the-pursuit-of-happine...

Zhang Yiming, the founder and CEO of Tik Tok's parent company, Bytedance, has pledged to use his company to promote "Socialist values" and support the Chinese communist party's "Ideology, political thinking, and deeds."

I don't know what Oracle is thinking, I mean, aside from everything else. Buying a consumer-oriented company would run counter to all their strategy for the past 40 years, I don't know how they can feel confident in their ability to manage such a business.

Well, it could be one way to get a big customer onto Oracle Cloud.

Everyone who doesn’t understand why this makes a ton of sense for Oracle, and why they should fight to win the deal, has clearly never heard of Datalogix. (The fact that nobody discusses this point in the tech press shows just how terrible they are at doing their jobs, but I digress.)

Given that Oracle has never run a large b2c application before and its lifeblood is enterprise b2b, I don't see how this synergy is even worth mentioning. Obviously there's a lot of money to be made in an application like tikok, the question is if you can run it and maintain it's brand successfully. Anyone familiar with Oracle is going to question that and that's what the journalism is going to reflect. A synergy with a data collection company (a b2b company they bought), isn't particularly worth mentioning.

The question then is will Oracle kill TikTok like Solaris?

Why does this make sense for Oracle?

The TikTok/Trump battle has been great for schadenfreude lovers. Adding Oracle and Larry Ellison into the mix makes for three players that I'm happy to see in this battle of dysfunction, losing money.

As much as I dislike Trump, I hate polarizing headlines that have no evidence in the article to back it up. They merely say that the administration could have power over the choice of acquirer through CFIUS. That Ellison is a donor to the Trump campaign so theoretically that could make Trump like them. But it's all hypothetical and not backed in evidence.

This is the type of journalism that is killing trust in professional news organizations today. It's exhausting and I am sick of it.

Indeed, whenever a headline contains "Trump" and "could"; I just automatically tune out. Same as for headlines ending with a "?", you know that it'll be speculation that is unlikely to be true or relevant in any way.

I'd love to see objective stats for headlines like this.

Spectacle is not the only motive for journalism like this. Speculation about presidential conflicts of interest is valuable and relevant to national discourse because the public's reaction to their existence directly impacts their power.

That's great if it is presented as speculation. But with clickbait headlines and initial paragraphs that make it sound like fact and that direct evidence is found is just bad reporting.

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