if US government says who is allowed to buy and buyers collude (by pooling financial and political capital together) they can easily not fight a bidding war and lowball instead
For me, it's very hard to conceive of any concrete way that would work. It's a brand, some partnerships, and a network of users that would all go to whatever buyer, and would give that buyer a huge benefit over their existing domestic competitors. So under what circumstances would those domestic competitors allow that instead of aggresively trying to secure it for themselves?
I'm open to believing you, I just don't see what you have in mind.
Larry Ellison (since he is CIA/MIC friendly and tiktok is already running on Oracle cloud)
Zuck has too much conflict to acquire tiktok, but other oligarchs like Musk/bezos/gates can pull it off, given their recent meetings with Trump
Why do you assume only a natural person can buy TikTok? Why do you assume you need political capital?
The law doesn’t provide that much executive deference in enforcement.
Plus FTC will review the acquisition process as well.
Do you have a counter example?
Why?
> Political capital is needed because the tiktok question is politicized heavily (national security as a reason)
This is entirely meaningless. You don’t need political capital to maintain the status quo.
> Do you have a counter example?
To your hypothetical? My example is the law. FACA is tightly defined. Bytedance needs to divest to a non-FAC to return to the status quo. Trump could do something else to fuck with them. But that’s true of anyone anywhere.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Delay. It’s not a deferential review.
Campaign with the president, offer large amounts of money to the presidents campaign, donate huge sums to a small inauguration party, and then just be picked to get it at a deep discount. The entire point of bribes is that corruption let's you get away with things at a lesser cost. You just screw over everyone else except for the bribe receiver.
It doesn’t. The courts do. TikTok could be sold to a Hungarian businessman. As long as it can’t be proved they aren’t controlled by China, they should be allowed to reënter app stores.
Generally speaking, we tend to refer to governments in countries with independent judiciaries as being separate from their courts. The same way we refer to the government in parliamentary democracies separately from their parliaments. (Or governments separately from a country’s people, even though one is a subset of the other.)
> Do you think there isn't any collusion between Supreme Court and the other branches of government?
Not super relevant here. This SCOTUS barely upheld the ban with Bytedance as the owner.
Given that the Court has been lobbied by billionaires, I find really hard to believe they wouldn't help an US company to buy it instead of a Hungarian or any other one.
As a rich person I’d rather get 30% of tiktok with 99% certainty by committing 30% of capital needed, rather than 100% of tiktok with 30% certainty and committing 100% of capital needed.