David Pierce

At first, Donald Trump wanted to ban TikTok.

And then Trump discovered pretty clearly how important TikTok was in getting him elected again in 2024.

The U.S.

and all of a sudden saw it as a politically useful platform and then engineered the thing to be sold to some of his close friends and allies.

If you just look at the set of things that has happened, it would be surprising if it doesn't end up being a politically geared right wing coded platform.

And so if you're Gavin Newsom to say, I am going to be your champion to keep TikTok as the thing that you want and not turned into the kind of cesspool that X has become, it's a smart move.

Sure.

So the new owners of TikTok are essentially three players that matter.

One is Oracle, the huge old Silicon Valley company owned by Larry Ellison, who is a very close friend of President Trump's.

Which we've covered on the show.

Um, MGX, which is an investment firm located in Abu Dhabi and Silver Lake, which is a huge private equity firm that is invested in just everything you can possibly think of.

Um, each of them has 15% of this new company.

The new company is called TikTok USDS joint venture LLC, which really just rolls off the tongue.

Yeah.

Uh, but everybody just calls it TikTok US.

So for all intents and purposes, it's Oracle, MGX, and Silver Lake are the controlling new investors in this company.

And most importantly of all is Oracle, right?

Oracle is in charge of the algorithm.

It's in charge of the privacy.

It's in charge of the data security.