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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

It would have been great for ByteDance to IPO TikTok in the USA, it has had plenty of time to do so, it would have made lots of people boatloads of money, Chinese and Americans alike. Even Snapchat, which had similar levels of pervasive arrogance, IPO'd.

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Yes. The Chinese government probably lost its citizens around $100b by not allowing TikTok to sell.

When you think of it as enough money to give a $100 bill to ~everybody in china, wow. That’s quite a bit of money.

Any amount of $$$ earned by CCP will not be easily passed down to citizens.

I’d be interested if there’s any objective measure of how much a countries money is passed down back to its citizens or hoarded by people in power. Is there any such measure?

Even if the money from the IPO itself doesnt go to directly to random citizens it still pumps a ton of money into their economy providing capital for other investments in new markets creating jobs, spending on goods/services by the company, hiring internally (IPOs always allow companies to expand), etc etc. That money doesn't just sit in a giant pile being unused, like Scrooge McDuck's gold pile.

Not to mention the training and development it would give a whole new class of people in China to operate global businesses.

So, you could say that that sweet large scale mind control is apparently worth more than $100b to them...

Sadly the expected value of it was less than $100B and the realized value in the end is zero.

In the late 80s and early 90s, the foreign-exchange reserves of China was less than a billion dollars. The US government could spend $50M to negotiate a lot of things from China, like having a war with Vietnam even though it was Soviet who was behind Vietnamese government. Nowadays, Chinese government could easily say fuck this $100B. Papa can afford it to call your bluff.

It's great that an entire nation can gain wealth through hard work and good strategic decisions, at least in some way. But it hurts me that the US lost its way in the process by losing so much manufacturing capabilities, to the point that we can't even adequately produce saline solutions, nor could we make shells or screws for our war planes cheaply.

Or the Chinese government can do its citizens a favor for forcing Apple, Tesla, Walmart, Starbucks, Johnson-Johnson, and all USA companies to sell itself to the Chinese people. So your suggest for how to deal with a pirate and terrorist is to bow down and pay the ransom. Got it, let's do that to you then. Could it be the inventor of Tiktok, who are Chinese citizens don't want their assets to be stolen by USA?

In fact, all countries in the world, USA just showed it is perfectly fine to steal a foreign companies' asset. Let's do that to all USA companies, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, Boeing, Qualcomn, Intel, all of them. U know how rich you will be if you just got a piece of them? U know you could end homelessness, poverty, balance trade, stabilize your currency, elevate tax revenues, get free education and health care for your citizens, provide great jobs if you just got a piece of USA companies? Now you can! All of them can be Indian, Germany, France, UK, Poland, Brazilian, Mexican, Canadian, Kenyan, Egyptian companies. Everyone gets a piece, everyone gets them equally, everyone will benefit and be happy!

It's not stealing, obviously.

You don't put your treasure for sale, at least not when you have extracted its value first.

So why didn’t they? Cmon. Is that not enough evidence to show you that something else is at play here? Of course going public would have been the honest and rational move. Communist governments would never

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